KennethT

Currently en route to Penang, Malaysia via Singapore on Singapore Airlines. It's currently 3:30PM NY time but I feel like it's 3AM as it's been a ridiculously stressful week. So much so that basically the first time I've had to research food is by renting wifi on the plane! Anyway, lunch for me was stir fried chicken with ginger and scallions, served with rice, Chinese broccoli and carrots. "appetizer was a smoked chicken salad with orzo and dill. All quite tasty. A snack of "margherita pizza" is up next. Vanilla flavored ice cream. Somewhere over Normandy, France

I thought all Westerners ate was steak?

I always have these in my refrigerator. I get them from the Hmart - normal supermarkets don't carry them. As the week goes on, they really perfume the refrigerator!

Maybe this is just me, but when I think of yellow onions, I think of the smaller size - about the size of a baseball, as opposed to the Spanish onion which is about the size of a softball. Do many people here have large size yellow onions available?

I used to have a large-ish Cuisinart and like many here never used it. I've now brought it into the factory at work - every once in a while we need to clean baked varnish off of our industrial walk-in oven's floor. I get pellets of dry ice and turn them into snow in the Cuisinart and spread on the varnish. Freezes in no time and cleans up much easier. BUT, I've been getting more and more into making Indonesian food (as well as other SE Asian foods) which would make lots of use of what @gfweb is talking about. Look at any YouTube video of people in SE Asia making SE Asian curries and all you see are things that look like the Bullet type blender or very small chopper. Currently I'm either doing it by hand with a mortar/pestle to make me feel like a SE Asian grandmother or I make a big enough batch to use my normal sized blender - but then I have to either add water or some oil to get it to blend properly.

Getting summer rolls for delivery or take out is always a problem. They're really meant to be eaten as soon as they're made. Have you had pho from this restaurant before? I don't know whether it was somebody's error that day or if that's just how they make theirs. We were at a pho place in Saigon which was really strong with star anise... that was just their style and it seemed like the people who went there went there because of it!

Healthy? Really? If this were true I'd be the happiest guy in the world!

A ramen-ya here in NYC has a noodle machine in the basement that you can watch working. Pretty cool.

I love pigeon (yes, usually called squab here). They're usually only found in either Chinese restaurants (typically the Cantonese roasted style) or in a French style served in a more rarefied way (and a lot more expensive). Either way, they're delicious. I used to always have a few in my freezer, but they've gotten way too expensive lately - over $10 a bird!! And yes, one time I did see a few Chinese people ina park witha net trying to catch wild pigeons! Hopefully they weren't intended to go to a restaurant in Chinatown. In your pigeon soup, is that a dried morel?

I don't think I've ever had purple rice. Is the rice itself purple or do you add something to make it that way? How is the taste/texture different from white rice?

Central Vietnam style Bún Tôm - noodle salad with shrimp - unfortunately, I can't really get bun here (the round rice noodles) so I used some narrow phở noodles instead. Using homegrown herbs. The shrimp was cooked with some of my reserved shrimp head fat from last week!

@Duvel I agree with both of you - I've had Paul stuff several times, but always in the airport and have been impressed with the quality - especially in the airport! But it is really the only option there so that's not saying much. I do still dream about a small boulangerie in Beaune where we got an amazing epis de ble (no knife required) to have with some local Epoisses...

What did you think of the bread from Paul? I've only had it in the airport.. CDG..

Fantastic... thank you so much for this. You've made me hungry to go there!

if it's anything like some of the Japanese noodles I can get here, each bundle is tied with some kind of ribbon - probably located beneath the colorful part of the cellophane wrapper just to make sure you can't see it!

Le Coq Rico did indeed close. At one point I had wanted to try it, until I saw their prices! Many years ago, a chef in a somewhat upscale restaurant had cocks combs on the tasting menu. It was quite good, albeit ridiculously rich and gelatinous. As if the combs themselves aren't gelatinous enough, it was served with a crazy rich/gelatinous sauce. I think I was smacking my lips for days afterwards!

I did this once!! It was long before 9/11 and was my first time to Paris. I bought a chef's knife and a paring knife from Dehillerin but I was afraid of it getting damaged in the checked luggage so I figured it would be safest in my carry-on. They had corks on the tips and the package was wrapped at the store. Going through security, the guy x-raying my bag stops and looks at me and says - sir, take the knife out of the bag! It was then an amusing 10 minute conversation testing my barely passable French trying to explain my logic of why I have an ,8" knife in my carry-on. Anyway, they determined I was stupid but harmless and they allowed me to check the knives at the gate. Of course, what happened? British Airways put the knife package in a box with no packing material, so when I got home I realized that the chef's knife 's tip got bent as it rolled around the box. Completely my fault for being an idiot and not putting it in my checked luggage (surrounded by clothes) in the first place.

Nothing better than mussels in Brussels.... I mean Antwerp....

Still pretending to be in Indonesia today, as it's 40degrees and raining here..... Sambal udang kecombrang. Sambal = chilli, udang = shrip, kecombrang = torch ginger. There's a lot of variations of sambal udang - this one was made using torch ginger flower, which I've had in my freezer forever.... It's really aromatic in a floral kind of way. The head on shrimp were deep fried which made the head and shell really crunchy, and really shrimpy! Plus I have a whole load of shrimp head fat oil now! Torch ginger defrosting And some kuih.... Shrimp head oil

Indonesian chicken soup.... And our weekly pandan fix

Prepping for SE Asia.... Nyonya chicken curry made with lots of dried spices. This dish is a great example of Indian influence on Malaysian food.

whew!

Veneiro's is literally right around teh corner from me, but I've only been there once, many years ago before I lived in that neighborhood!!! And I didn't have the cannoli... but I imagine they'd be pretty good. I think I had a cheesecake that was pretty good.

ahhhhh..... I thought it looked like that directly from them. didn't realize it was operator error!

It's the same place. It was either on E. Broadway or Division St (or somewhere around there) but then it closed. Several months later, it reopened in a space on Bowery just north of Canal, iirc. They were an early pandemic casualty and never reopened.