KennethT

I don't know if it's available in winter, but I find it hard to leave NO without getting a snowball, aka sno-ball, aka sno-bliz. The last time we were there, we enjoyed walking down Tchoupitoulas to Hansen's... lots of home-made syrups and flavors and great texture on their sno from their vintage snow machine.

We enjoyed Bayona when we were there, which like I said before, we a long time ago. Nice thing about NO is that if you don't finish your bottle of wine by the end of dinner, you can get the rest in to go cups so you can enjoy it while wandering around. Sitting at the table next to us was the band The Radiators, who evidently go there quite often when in town.

That's Cochon Butcher - an offshoot of Cochon.... this is what everyone's talking about I was there a long time ago also - it was one of the best meals we had there... but again, taht was a long time ago.

@Chris Hennes Me too....My wife and I used to go to NO every year around Easter weekend for a while, although we haven't done so in years. There's a lot of great food there - I'm excited to see where you go and how things have changed.

I've used zip lock freezer bags for years with no problems. You can squish the air out as you close the bag, or use the water displacement method leaving a corner of the bag open as you drop the bag into the water - the water squishes the air out the open corner - then seal the corner before it drops below the surface of the water.

I hadn't looked into whether it was labeled sushi grade or not. I guess you cooked it through rather than just seared?

How did you like WF's tuna? I haven't tried that yet. I really liked their mahi mahi.

I think it was Hong Li meat market on Mott between Hester and Grand. They not only had raw meats, but also a cooked meat section where you could get roast ducks, pork, etc. Edit - hmm, maybe not - maybe it's Deluxe Market on Elizabeth between Hester and Grand.

In the past, when I wanted a ridiculously good stock (or making the chicken rice master stock) I'd use go to Chinatown to get a silky chicken and a couple of old stewing hens, plus some extra feet. The meat market I used to go to (prepandemic) carried Bobo farms stuff and had both types of chickens (years ago I once got one of each plus a blue foot chicken from Ottomanelli and did a side by side tasting), and also silkies, stewing hens, quail, squab, you name it. One of these days, now that I live a bit closer, I have to get back there.

I used to get Bobo chickens in Chinatown - I used to really like the (I think) red plume chickens (maybe they called it black plume back then? I get confused with the names)- very similar to what I see in Asia - not as plump breasts but really meat legs and really flavorful. To add - I just checked their website - they no longer refer to the chickens as black plume or red plume - now it's HK/Euro style or US style.

Maybe 10 years ago, I invested in a small chest freezer - it lives in an inconspicuous place in the living room. It's the best thing ever. It's footprint is 2x2 feet but it holds so much. And a great advantage of it is that it is non-self defrosting and really cold - like -10 to -15F which means that the stuff you keep in there doesn't have temperature cycles so it stays frozen in better condition. The only thing I keep in the defrosting freezer is stuff like stock, frozen bread, frozen cold packs, and stuff I use often like frozen thai chillies, galangal, grachai, banana and pandan leaves, etc.

@BeeZeeWe used to use FD for the vast majority of our groceries. As @weinoo said, if there's a problem, they refund promptly. For instance, this past week, I ordered some "ready to eat" avocadoes. The 2 pack came in undamaged, but one of the avocadoes was ridiculously soft - I guess good for smoothies, but not what was typical and not what I was looking for. All you need to do is send a message to them through the website - our whole avocado purchase was refunded no questions asked. That being said - it does kind of shoot any plans you may have, even if you don't have to pay for it. Nowadays, like @gfweb, I use Wild Fork for the vast majority of my meat purchases. Their quality has been great and I can't beat the prices anywhere. They're like half the price of Fresh Direct or even my least expensive local supermarket (but I'm in Manhattan, so take that with a grain of salt). I get a lot of the air chilled, antibiotic free chicken parts - sure, they're not any heritage breed, but when defrosted, there's just about no liquid weeping out. And I love that I can get a 2.5# bag of thighs which usually has 6 evenly sized thighs IQF so I can defrost as many as I need - all for like $2.40 per pound. That's like half the price of Katie's Best (the brand I used to get at FD) and I can't tell the difference - except that KB would sometimes maddeningly put 1 giant thigh with 2 moderate sized and 1 quail thigh in a vacuum sealed 4 pack. All that, and they have some specialty items I can't find locally - like ground Elk.

Anne Gros' website is really informative as well - she has the whole Gros geneology - as is lots of areas in Burgundy, it gets confusing!!! https://www.anne-gros.com/en/history/genealogy/

Nice- I love Richebourgs but I'm not sure I know that particular Gros.... We love Anne Gros (as opposed to Anne F Gros). What's a Bryan Flannery steak?

Wow - that looks great! If we lived closer, I think my wife would want to be there once a week!

Are the recipes in teh book for classic Viet dishes, or western dishes made using fish sauce? Personally, I have no interest in the latter, but a lot of interest in the former!

I'm curious as to what you will think of the book and recipes, being that you're so close to Vietnam. Do you know if anyone in Asia uses Red Boat? I've never tried it myself - I have a hard time spending so much $ on something that I can get a very good example of cheaply.

Can you reuse the chillies or would they get burnt the next time around? I understand though - my curry powder required about 150g of chillies, snipped and deseeded.

I'm sure it is interchangeable. For years I've been making a Nyonya coconut milk based curry that uses it, but I've always bought premade curry powders from Kalustyans - I've tried their Malaysian powder and Indonesian powder but neither are quite right - and they don't have a Nyonya or Singapore powder. So I'm curious as to how this will come out. The restaurant Nyonya in Chinatown makes this curry with chicken but also with shrimp (shell on). Years ago, I loved a similar shrimp curry at Penang in Soho.

I'd be happy to give you some - I made more than enough that I could use, but it's a very specific type of curry powder for a Nyonya chicken curry - I don't know if it's something you'd be interested in. Plus, this is my first time making/using it, so I don't even know if it's going to taste how I want it to - I'll know more in a day or two when I make the finished dish.

Here it is - a couple of pounds of curry powder in the largest mixing bowl I have. Buried in it is a tablespoon sized soup spoon. For best results, fresh powder should be stored airtight - and will last longest if kept in the freezer. @weinoo is correct - once cooled (the blender really heats them up while grinding) I'm going to portion in 1 meal packages - probably about 85g each and freeze.

I have made curry powders in small batches before - but never like I've been doing today. Probably over 1 kg of spices - forget my spice mill, I wound up grinding in my high powered blender - I had so much that I still had to do it in batches - probably about 2-1/2 to 3 blender jars full! Pics in a bit - the chillies weren't fully done after the low and slow, so now I'm doing just those at like 175F convection for 15 minutes, then I'll let cool and blend them in.

@Laurentius - yes, even though it doesn't sit flat, it still gets hot, for sure. But, many times people do deep frying or shallow frying in a wok, or boiling in water, not just stir frying, and in those cases, having a slightly convex bottom is quite dangerous. I've managed it a couple times, but I don't want to do it too much and push my luck.

Bumping this old thread to ask some advice. I have a Joyce Chen thin carbon steel flat bottomed wok, 14" that I use on my induction burner. My problem is that the flat bottom is no longer flat - it is convex, so the wok isn't stable when it rests on the induction burner. I'm debating trying to flatten it vs getting a new one. The issue is that my induction burner is very powerful, but since it's relatively inexpensive, when put in a low power setting, it just turns the high power on and off a few seconds each. Moving to a thicker carbon steel wok might keep it from warping, but doesn't that defeat the purpose of a wok - something that heats and cools quickly? Also, I've read that to keep it from warping, you shouldn't heat the wok without anything in it, but then how does one season it (not in the oven)? And I've always thought that the way to cook with a wok is to heat it empty until it smokes, then add the oil, which helps make it nonstick... Also, I usually let the wok sit on the heat after I've rinsed it and wiped it to allow the super thin left over oil turn into more seasoning - is this not a good idea?

Perfect. Thank you. My spice mixture includes poppy seeds as well, but it says to leave them out; Dishoom's advice for them makes sense. I wanted to look there, but my e-book version from my library expired.