Katie Meadow

Mmm...potato salad. I like many different kinds, some with mayo, some with vinegar and olive oil. There are two essential ingredients for potato salad: good quality flavorful potatoes cooked al dente--and celery. Yes, I know there are people who won't eat celery. If you come to my party I will make you a special bowl of potato salad sans celery, but everybody else will get celery. I might add radish, red onion, eggs, jalapenos, pickles of various kinds, whatever is around or whatever appeals in the moment. Spanish smoked paprika dusted on at the end can do wonders for a potato salad. Home-made mayo? Yum. But the potato should always be the star, not the mayo. Once in a great while I can be in such a good mood that I will eat without complaint the ice-cold stuff that's served alongside ribs in BBQ joints, but generally it's awful. I call the potato salad (and the slaw and noodle concoctions) in those places Mayonnaise Salad. Too much egg, overcooked cheap starchy potatoes, too much sugar, too much sweet pickle and far far too much mayo. I'm there for the pork; if I'm outside at a picnic table and the sun is shining I am pretty forgiving of those salads. But even when I enjoy them they are still awful--in that special way. I prefer warm or recently made potato salad. The potatoes should be waxy or new potatoes--red or white. Yukon Golds are good. French fingerlings are fantastic. I agree with many posters above, that sprinkling on the vinegar and some salt when the potatoes are still very warm, then letting that sit for a bit, makes for a better bite. Here's a simple potato salad that doesn't use mayo and subs lemon juice for most of the vinegar. It goes especially well with any southwestern menu. I've tweaked it in the last few years, but I think it might have originally been a Bon Appetit recipe. Potato Salad with Toasted Cumin Vinaigrette: Toast a couple of tsps. cumin seeds in a heavy skillet over med heat til fragrant, about 30 seconds. Cool. Grind coarsely. Mix lemon juice and olive oil to taste for a dressing. Add the ground cumin and let sit. Cook potatoes. Cut while hot and sprinkle with a modest amount of plain or cider vinegar and some salt. When cooler, add minced celery and red onion, thinly sliced scallions, chopped hard-cooked eggs, minced pickled jalapenos to taste and a handful of chopped cilantro. Salt and pepper to taste. If you like, sprinkle on a little of the pickled jalapeno juice from the jar. The recipe says it can sit 2 hrs at room temp before serving. It's very good and a little different.

Slices of mixed colorful varieties alternating with slices of avocado sprinkled with sea salt and garnished with red onion and a drizzle of olive oil. Slices of tomato with slices and fresh buffalo mozz, drizzled with oil and sprinkled with fresh basil. Greek salads with fresh baguette for sopping up. Uncooked sauce for pasta: chop several tomatoes and salt to taste. Let sit in a bowl while you bring pasta water to boil. Before serving add best olive oil, fresh ground pepper and/or red pepper flakes, fresh chopped basil, whatever. For an interesting twist omit the oil and add small chunks of butter instead. Spoon liberally over hot pasta. It's a bit labor intensive, but my favorite thing to do with tomatoes if I have lot of them is make fresh tomato soup. The simpler the better: for 12 to 15 medium red tomatoes you need only 3 or 4 oz of butter, a cup of dry red wine and fresh herbs or garlic crouts for garnish. A tomatoey gazpacho. Tomato tart.

Thanks for all the suggestions. My goal is to do the best I can within the limits of my patience. You have shamed me into admitting that we have been stashing the coffee in the freezer in the Peets paper sack that it is sold in; clearly not well sealed, and opened to the air every other day or two. I am not going to buy a vac sealer, and being realistic about this, I don't see myself buying less coffee more often. I can believe that frozen beans have less flavor, but will now test that out. I also read that grinding frozen beans dulls the blades on the grinder. I don't find that to be the case, since my grinder is about 30 yrs old; the blades got duller after the first 10 years, but then they reached stasis and continue to do a fine job. So it seems like my best option is this: when I bring my coffee home I should put a week's worth in a mason jar and keep it in a dark place. Divide the remaining beans into week's worth portions and freeze them in well-sealed heavy plastic bags, getting as much air as possible out before sealing. Decant as needed into the mason jar. I believe I can do this. Dave, I just looked at that vacu vin coffee saver. I am guessing that the pump costs more that the container. And what do they mean by the "dark color of the container?" It looks like clear plastic. But wait, there's more!

Thanks, Morgan. That's a good concise history of yvette and violette. And I love the caveat that follows the recipe for the fizz w/Violette, warning that if you make the drink with soy milk instead of heavy cream it will taste different.

There's a lobster roll, and then there's a lobster salad sandwich served on a roll (or bun) that's often wrongly billed as a lobster roll. The lobster salad sandwich has smaller pieces of lobster and standard salad ingredients such as celery and mayo. The classic lobster roll, in my mind, means a grilled buttered roll or bun and unadulterated large hunks of lobster. The lobster salad sandwich with mayo can be good, if it isn't done with too much mayo. If the roll is lightly toasted and lightly buttered it's even better. Then the lobster salad can be fairly cold and makes a nice contrast. The lobster roll that is the minimalist thing of my dreams is a toasted roll with a slather of sweet butter and large hunks of lobster sprinkled modestly with sea salt. In this case, I prefer my lobster to be room temp or cool, but not really cold. The perfect lobster roll should not be dripping with butter. It goes without saying that the lobster should be as fresh as possible and not overcooked. I have a very hard time believing that a McLobster would be worth eating. I'm probably going against the grain here, but any small improvement in the quality of the bread/bun/roll is a good thing. It should still be a simple white-flour affair, but I am of the opinion that the average supermarket hot dog and hamburger buns are just plain awful. The best accompaniments to a lobster roll are home-made potato chips and a light lemony slaw.

Both my husband and I have cut back on coffee, so we don't drink it every morning. We buy a 1/2 pound in the bean maybe every three weeks and have been storing it in the freezer, taking out and grinding only as much as we need for a given pot. It's been suggested that grinding frozen beans doesn't maximize flavor and that instead I should take from the freezer about a weeks's worth of beans, whatever that might be, keep it at room temp in an airtight container and grind per pot as always. I checked the coffee threads and couldn't much find info there devoted to storing coffee beans. How long can beans be at room temp without ill effect? What type of container preserves beans best at room temp? I don't want to be too fussbudgety about this, but I think of coffee as a special treat now, and want to get the most out of my cup.

My good friend Sandy, who seems lately to be very interested in cocktails but doesn't actually make them, dropped by at lunchtime yesterday with a bottle of Rothman Creme de Violette. She came mainly to pick my husband's brain about how he makes labels. Her plan is to decant it into several lovely blue bottles and give it as gifts. We tasted it undiluted and then poured a little into water to see how strong the taste and color were. My husband thinks it smells like a French hospital. Sandy tasted mostly just sweet. I thought it was pretty complex, fragrant and slightly medicinal, but in an interesting way. I could tell right away that the Rothman does not produce an intense blue color, at least not in realistic quantities. So, when we get our bottle with its lovely custom design label, what, besides an Aviation, should we make? We typically don't make cocktails beyond a classic martini, G & T, and once in a blue moon a Corpse Reviver or, once every four years of course, a Leap Year, so we don't keep a lot of mixing ingredients on hand. I prefer drinks that are relatively simple and don't require armloads of ingredients and I'm not one who likes to drink my candy bars. I would certainly have to make a special trip for maraschino of some kind, but then I could always decant some for Sandy. So...other ideas for using my Violette?

I probably liked brunch a million years ago when I slept in and had a hangover and woke up slowly, craving eggs or juice or whatever. But I don't wake up late on the weekends any more. I need a little something soon, and can't wait until eleven o'clock. If I have my usual breakfast of one piece of toast or maybe a bowl of oatmeal I won't want a huge cholesterol laden meal three hours later. I don't even like to eat breakfast out--I'm not hungry enough to justify a restaurant meal at that hour, nor do I want to get completely dressed to do it. The only time I can remember enjoying a big late breakfast meal was when I was part of a hippie farm community. Yes, I really was. We had a cow and chickens and plenty of pork products always on hand. One of us was a roly-poly ruddy cheerful dude who grew up on an Argentine ranch and loved to cook. Mountains of scrambled just-laid eggs, highways of bacon, freshly baked bread, home-churned butter, all washed down with strong coffee and milk which was basically half & half straight out of the cow. At the end of this year-long experiment we were all wearing large baggy overalls because no other clothes would fit; at least you can look cute wearing that if you are milking a goat. Truthfully it gives me more pleasure to think about it now than it would to eat it. How did the American breakfast and brunch become such a heartbreaker? It made sense on the farm, I guess. But now, if you try to limit cholesterol and animal fat you have a hard time at a brunch. If you drink three bloody marys to compensate you don't feel so good either. Some Asian cultures have a good idea with soup for breakfast. I can see eating a steaming bowl of pho on a cold winter morning, but I don't really want to go out for it wearing my jammies.

I'm really looking forward to the Waitsburg experience next time I go to visit my daughter. Meanwhile I am trying to get her to go for the pho and report back, but have been unsuccessful so far. She would be a good test, since she's used to great Viet food when she's home. Despite full-time summer jobs she and her friends are shockingly frugal and never eat out. Okay, I'm not complaining. Beauxbrie, I would agree with you about the croissant at Colville. It was just dripping with butter. It was all outside, and no inside, if you know what I mean. I am not a huge croissant fan ordinarily but in France we stopped at a roadside bakery outside a small town and had a wood-fired croissant that was crunchy and flaky and a little smoky on the outside and totally greaseless. There was a real inside, also greaseless and light and more like...like a cloud. I thought about that croissant for the rest of trip. My husband and mother were amazed, since I'm not typically wowed by pastry. It was different than anything I've ever experienced. It was so good it made me want to weep. So that's my standard. Next time I will try the kouign aman. But I was not disappointed in my Colville experience; the coffee was very good and the atmosphere lovely and the sun was pouring in on our table by the window. I did end up ordering a birthday cake from Colville over the phone. The owner was gracious and happy to accomodate a special order (I switched the filling on one of his standard cakes) and my daughter said it was wonderful, although I believe that by then--Sunday afternoon of her birthday weekend--she was partied out and this was her third cake. My parents never ordered me a cake like that when I was away at college.

I have tried frying both ways: without any batter coating and with a very thin light egg and flour batter. I found that the eggplant sans batter sucks up more total olive oil than the battered eggplant (that doesn't sound right does it? That poor battered eggplant!) The batter absorbs only what it needs to brown, but the uncoated eggplant just keeps on absorbing. The result was that the eggplant w/no coating tasted very oily. The eggplant when coated was far more intense in flavor and perfectly soft without being oily. Using relatively thick slices helps to maximize the vegetable and minimize the oil. Really just a personal thing, but for me battering has another bonus, which is that it allows for the integrity of the eggplant in the finished dish. It has more structure that way, making it easier and prettier to serve and less like a mushy casserole. If you are wishing to eliminate the oil and/or the batter I think baking would be a better solution.

kl: brainy idea to add the salt first. How long do you let the meat sit w/salt before adding the rub? Then how long between rubbing and grilling? As a guideline do you like a 1:1 ratio for unsweetened cocoa:brown sugar? Did you prefer the recipe with 3 parts coffee to approx 1 part chili powder to the one that was closer to 1 part each? I know the heat varies depending upon what type of chili you are using, but for the sake of argument let's say ground ancho. I like the idea of finding a workable base of fresh ground coffee, chili, cocoa and sugar, then varying the rub with other herbs or seasonings depending upon what's on hand.

I've just become a Pimm's initiate. Check out the Pimm's thread--very informative! Cucumber is an integral ingredient to most drinks made with Pimm's No. 1. I learned there is a tradition of lemon soda or lemonade as well as ginger ale. Eje above suggests using a ginger beer for a little more spice. That sounds yummy. I think making your own ginger ale with fresh ginger would be fantastic. I didn't see any drinks made with cucumber water, but one person suggested infusing the Pimm's by letting the cucumber sit in it for a couple of hours. I tried it for an hour and then got impatient. It was good! I add a squirt of lemon and some bruised mint to my Pimm's cup; I'm not a soda drinker, and most sodas taste too sweet to me. So far I am using a craft ginger ale. It's good but still benefits from lemon juice to tarten it up.

This cocoa thing got me curious, so I dug up an old SF Chronicle recipe that was adapted from a Scharffenberger recipe, no doubt in their attempt to convince people that their cocoa nibs are, in fact, edible. They are, sort of. My daughter had given me a pack of them and I've been trying to use them up for the better part of a year now. Cocoa nib brownies was the most successful, but this turned out to be a pretty good way to used them. We started with a 1lb flanksteak. The recipe was a little strange, calling for 1 T of hot red pepper flakes. I subbed the same amount of ground ancho chile. It called for 1 T of cocoa nibs, 1 1/2 T of brown sugar (I cut it back to 1 T), half tsp of cumin seeds and 1/4 tsps of dry mustard and allspice. It also called for 1 T of kosher salt, which according the recipe, resulted in each portion having 1.714 mg of sodium. That seemed like a ridiculous amount of salt, and being a person who has, over the years, adapted happily to using less salt, I cut way way back on that. All the ingredients went into the coffee grinder. I tasted it and proceded to add some ground coffee. I couldn't stop myself. The recipe suggested applying the rub at least 8 hours before grilling, so that's what we did. It was very good, considering my proportions were fairly haphazard. Next time I would try it with a rib-eye instead. If flanksteak is at all tough I think it does better with a wetter marinade rather than a dry rub. And all the flanksteak I have been buying this year seems tougher than it used to be, whether I'm doing a stir-fry or grilling it whole. Tri2Cook: your pork rub sounds good, but you don't say if you liked the way it turned out. With almost twice the amount of cocoa to chili, was the taste of the cocoa very pronounced?

You have my sympathy. I have a good friend who has had gout for many years. He is not on any preventive medicine, but takes some prescriptive med when he has an outbreak. A while ago he backed off red meat, but didn't go cold turkey. He still eats shellfish as well, also in moderation. The only thing he completely stopped eating was smoked meats and head-cheese. For some reason that escapes me he ate a lot of head-cheese. He and his wife have upped their consumption of beans and it has not been a problem. Nor is oatmeal; he eats it every day for breakfast. He drinks red wine, also in moderation. He doesn't think cherry juice does anything for him, but does eat large quantities of raspberries and blueberries. He hasn't had an outbreak in over a year, and he had many of them before that. He believes it's the smoked meats and the head-cheese that are the worst offenders. Almost every disease has dietary prohibitions and prescriptions that work for some people. Trial and error. Good luck!

My desire to change from charcoal to gas was motivated solely by convenience. Charcoal grills get fantastic results, but if you have limited time or energy and like grilled foods on a regular basis, even in a mild winter, gas is easier. Now I don't think twice about grilling and probably grill ten times more often than I did with a charcoal grill. That counts for a lot. I wouldn't dispute the superior taste that can be had with wood or charcoal when a practiced chef is on duty, but on the other hand, with a little talent and experimenting, a steak or rotisserie chicken cooked on a gas grill is awfully damned good. One of my main concerns about going to gas was that many of the gas grills I checked out did not have cast iron grill racks. We ended up buying a very modest Weber Genesis for which we were able to order replacement cast iron racks. They don't present a sticking problem and they get plenty hot enough to make for beautiful dark criss-cross grill marks. I know people who really enjoy making a wood or charcoal fire. More power to them! Invite me over! If anyone in my household was so motivated and cared enough to do it at the drop of a hat when tired and hungry I might be the proud owner of a charcoal grill. I might dig a pit and grow my own hickory trees! But all things considered, I get delicious smoky grilled carcinogenic food while I kick back with a gin & tonic and give no thought to my heat source. So what's better, charcoal or gas? Life's too short to argue about it. If it gives you pleasure, bring on the fancy wood. Or turn on the gas.

I kind of don't think so, Chris. I think the concept of an entree--if that is indeed what we are talking about when we talk about focus--is pretty much a standard for vegetarians as well as meat eaters. Whether it revolves around separate hunks of protein, smaller amounts of protein mixed into stir-fry or big soup or a casserole with no animal protein at all, it represents the "main event" in a staggered meal that marches along in a more or less orderly fashion. And my experience with vegetarians (I hope I don't get a lot of flack for this), which includes many many years of eating with my in-laws, is that many vegetarians--at least many who became vegetarians in the sixties--are actually very traditional in the way they approach a meal. They are the folks who forged the "substitute" entrees--tofu burgers, etc--dishes that try to make vegetarian foods look and taste like non-veg foods and which emulate the traditional meals of an American childhood. Many of my daughter's college-age friends who, like her, grew up eating lots of ethic foods have a much more sophisticated approach to a vegetarian diet. But I've digressed. I really don't know much about the origins of Spanish tapas, but that's hardly vegetarian. Clearly in this country we elevated the concept of small plates or tapas from bar food to "why not make a meal of this stuff?" since it was often better and more interesting than just eating one entree, and you could fool yourself into thinking you were eating less. Always appealing for the American Waistline. But have the Spanish had a long tradition of small plates as a complete dinner option? In restaurants that's easy to do, but if you are eating in a Spanish home, or out for country/rustic food in Spain (and I've never been) aren't you most likely to find more traditional menus with a main course?

Dave, I too add strong brewed coffee to red pork chili. For some reason I have never done it with beef chili, but I rarely make beef chili. Sometimes I add bitter chocolate to my chile by mixing unsweetened cocoa with a very small amount of sugar, making a slurry and dumping it in. I usually add coffee and/or this chocolate about a third or halfway through the cooking time, which for a pork stew might be a couple of hours. Dunno exactly why I add it then. Perhaps adding a small dusting of cocoa to a chili rub would be interesting. Sounds like you are already using sugar in your rub, so you could omit any extra of that. If you added a little cinnamon it might be like a mexican chocolate kind of thing--certainly a natural with ancho chili.

Focus or lack thereof is an interesting subject. I find that as I get older I really enjoy dinners that have no focus--which usually translates as no entree. In a good light I would call it a meal of tapas. In the height of summer, on a day I go to the farmers' market that's most likely to be a vegetarian meal, since I can't chose between beautiful corn, beets, tomatoes, fingerlings etc., so we just have them all. You don't necessarily need an entree to make balance. To me, the above small plates with the addition of some yummy cheeses or oysters or pate as an app with drinks would be a perfect meal, but I make the assumption that most guests would prefer a more traditional dinner. I think I have become a pretty quirky eater in some ways; although there aren't many foods I don't like, I do need to limit cholesterol and fat. Many in my husband's family are vegetarians and have grown up with very typical casseroles that often rely on carbohydrates and cheese like the old standards of lasagna, eggplant parm, savory pies and enchiladas. I am used to making that type of thing when we eat with them. Since I need to stay away from cheese and butter, when we eat vegetarian at home it's seldom stuff like that. Perhaps that's why the multi-salad tapas-style is very appealing to me. Back to focus and balance, I would probably have been quite happy with the meal you served, but I can certainly see how that cornucopia of medit food would make you yearn for lamb kabobs. I am guessing you have had them by now or are about to!

I don't eat a lot of beef, but when I have beautiful rib-eye steaks I can't resist this rub. It's more or less from a Bobby Flay recipe called Barbeque Cowboy Steaks. I use less salt, substitute New Mexico chile or ancho chile for black pepper and use less garlic powder or fresh sqeezed garlic. If I am altering 3 out 6 ingredients perhaps it really isn't his recipe any more. This makes enough for three or four steaks. The rub goes on and the steaks sit at room temp for about an hour before grilling. 1 tsp or less salt (he calls for 1 Tbsp, which seems scary to me!) 1 tsp Hungarian sweet paprika 1/2 tsp garlic powder or fresh sqeezed garlic (he uses 1 tsp) 1 tsp ground ancho chili (he uses black pepper) 1 tsp ground dry thyme 1 tsp finely ground coffee beans The ground coffee just knocks me out. I imagine that you could add ground coffee to a variety of chili-based rubs and it would deepen them.

I come from the camp in which "fancy" doesn't necessarily mean expensive ingredients; it can mean labor intensive or complex cooking. Since this is summer, I might go for a paella instead of a cassoulet. Lovely delicate English peas, beautiful bivalves and a dramatic presentation. Not necessarily something that breaks the bank. Having a paella is the perfect excuse to serve jamon (dressed up with melon--yum!) for a starter, which does break the bank. Or proscuitto and melon isn't too shabby either. Can you ever go wrong with oysters? I don't mind the shucking if I have company to talk to, and oysters go great with champagne if it's a special occasion. I like the suggestions above of a tomato consomme if you have some fabulous tomatoes already. That would work even without the crab as something simple made really special. It's the kind of thing almost no one ever makes for themselves. For me the most special foods are the ones the are seasonal and at their peak. The one simple thing I appreciate most these days is fresh wild salmon: healthy, and pricey enough so most people I know don't eat as much of as they would like. For dessert I would showcase whatever fruits are best right now, like peaches. Perfect fresh fruit paired with an exotic sorbet. That pineapple carpaccio w/sichuan jelly and basil sorbet sounds out of this world. Thai basil sorbet, yeah? Ermintrude, where is that recipe?

Is this the kind of movie theater where you eat WHILE you watch the movie? If that's the case, and you can stand to watch a movie with a lot of slurping and clattering going on, then what you drink with your chili cheese fries should be wide open. If you come in late and get the last two seats on the lumpy couch with broken springs and the wobbling postage stamp of a table, get the white wine, which won't stain. But that would be the kind of place where nothing has a bouquet of lychee. I don't see how the chili necessarily makes red wine a no-no. There are plenty of very spicy dishes-- "chicken a la diavolo" or hot Italian sausages or pizza with peppers--that you might drink red wine with. And you certainly have plenty of occasion to drink a red with fries, like when you have steakfrites. Oh, you did mean balcony, right? Because if they serve baloney, or even bologna, then maybe a beer would be better.

Carrots with harissa above sounds very yummy! If you've got some nice tomatoes a Greek salad with some cukes, feta and olives would be perfect, along with a fresh baguette, of course. As long as you are firing up the grill you could make some babganouj; home-made w/grilled eggplant is far superior to any deli-prepared. Medium size eggplants will only take about 20 minutes (while you are prepping other stuff) and then you can grill the other veggies. Cook eggplants, turning to evenly char, til blackened on the outside and very soft inside. Scrape out and mash the pulp, including a little of the smokey skin. Mix in about 1/4 c tahini for two or three eggplants, or to taste. Add a drizzle of olive oil, some lemon juice, salt and cumin. Serve with a sprinkling of paprika and/or chopped parsley and another drizzle. If you don't have pita bread, I find it's just as good or better on a baguette or scooped up with those pricey but delicious Panzanella crackers.

Thank you, Katie. Here is the recipe, I hope you enjoy it - shaking beef (click). ← Made the recipe pretty much as written, except my flanksteak seemed a little tough, even cutting into it raw, so instead of cubing the meat I decided to slice it very thin and marinate if for half an hour in the soy, oyster sauce, garlic and an addition of a little rice wine. Then I wok-seared it hot and fast. This is a great dish (and so simple!), especially in warm weather, now that real tomatoes are starting to appear. Immensely satisfying combination of strong flavors. Thanks!

I had mixed results and very mixed enthusiasm for making my own hummus until I found three things: a good brand of garbanzos, a good brand of tahini and a good recipe. Chickpeas in a can always taste tinny to me. There is an Italian brand called Annalisa that's not expensive and comes in a jar. The chickpeas taste clean and not stale. As for tahini, I never could deal with that stuff in the can; it's always separated and the solids are like cement. Now I buy a bottled brand made by Sadaf, which I can find in a large Arab or middle eastern deli. It's smooth and needs little mixing so it's very easy to use, and it's 100% sesame w/no preservatives. It's a mystery to me why it doesn't separate, but it doesn't. Tastes really pure and nice. Finally I found a Mark Bittman recipe that makes a balanced and flavorful hummus, and it's easy to adjust the proportions to your taste. I don't think I've had Sabra products; sounds like a good bet in a pinch. I'm pretty much used to making my own hummus and babaganoush; it's fast and simple in the processor and the cost savings are far greater than half, as suggested above. I've seen plenty of flavored spreads that are called "hummus" as if the word means "dip." Seems like a stretch, to me--they might be very good, but in my book hummus means chickpeas, tahini, garlic, lemon, oil and spices.

That pineapple sounds interesting. Our pineapple choices in this country are going the way of the banana. I find Mexican-grown pineapple is more flavorful than the ubiquitous and very bland Dole Hawaiian, but it isn't always available. Yes, tropical fruits seem to have an affinity for savory and hot, as in salsas and chutneys; of course they grow where the season is long enough to grow hot peppers and tomatoes, so it make sense. I like pineapple the way I first had it as street food in Mexico--with a squirt of lime and a sprinkle of ancho chili powder (in a lovely paper cone!) And I admit to liking it grilled or broiled, with sea salt and brown sugar. Ooh, I 'm having a Sunset Magazine moment.