trillium

What are yu-sheng and jai? I believe trillium's reference to jai is to a primarily-or-all-vegetarian dish. Typically, over the New Year, it contains, among other things "fat choy" (not formal translation) -- a black vermicelli-thin seaweed or vegetable material (?) -- and might contain certain limited non-vegetarian items (e.g., dried oysters, which are pronounced "ho see", sounding like "good things"). The vegetable dish will usually have Chinese black mushrooms, and have a brown-colored sauce. "Jai" generically can refer to Buddhist vegetarian cuisine when used in certain contexts. However, that is not the New Year's reference. Yep, I was being lazy and just using the generic term for Buddhist vegetarian (really is vegan) food, but I meant a particular dish that appears around the lunar new year-- bak bo jai which is eight treasures vegetable dish (um, something might be getting lost in the translation). The things you put in it are pretty optional I think, but it should add up to eight, which sounds lucky. Ours usually includes cloud ear, shitake, ginko nuts and fat choy (again because saying it sounds lucky). Some Cantonese versions include dried seafood like oysters, but others think it should be a dish that doesn't have any animal products in it. Eating dead animals or their products on the new year isn't auspicious for some, but others like how oysters sound when you say it and they figure fish doesn't count as meat. Yu sheng is something traditional amongst Singaporean Chinese and probably Malaysian too. It's a tossed raw fish salad, fish (yu) sounds like excess, which is something you want and sheng is life. Everybody is supposed to toss it at the same time with their chopsticks shouting (or toasting, I guess) "loa hei", which means to mix it up but also sounds like prosper more. From an outsider's viewpoint, a lot of these dishes seem to me to be tasty and have puns which are for prosperity, luck, abundance, etc. and that are why they're eaten at new year. We skipped yu sheng while we lived in Chicago because it was harder to find good sushi grade fish. It's kinda like xmas and thanksgiving rolled into one and as a kid is pretty cool because you get to eat all these treats you don't usually get (like fried foods and soft drinks) and you get bao, money the married people hand out in little red envelopes. regards, trillium

Please please please. It's definitely possible to be allergic (not a true allergy, but a genetic inability to metabolize) to certain amino acids. You Please please please what??? I can't figure out why you're quoting me. I thought I was talking about the molecular biology of taste and how there is a lot of free glutamate in things we eat besides Chinese food. I'm no physician, and would never claim that you couldn't be allergic to anything. My offer for reviews was for the ones done by research scientists on G-protein coupled taste receptors found on tongues and nothing more. regards, trillium I think mamster was saying he'd really like to read the reviews (as a biologist he almost qualifies as a scientist). I'd be interested too. Gotcha. It must be a personality failing that I read sarcasm where none is intended! I'm not sure how this email thing works here, I'm still better at Usenet than this, but I think you can email me and let me know what you'd like (references or the article) and if a pdf format would work. regards, trillium

One of my favorite dishes is chicken steamed with golden needles (dried lily buds), wood ear and shitake. Another nice one is steamed beef (strips of flank) steamed with chun pay (aged tangerine peel) and preserved tangerine peel. Another good seasoning for steamed minced pork cake is anthing salted to preserve it: hum yue (salted fish) or hum dan (salted duck egg) or salted turnip. regards, trillium

Long-life noodles (sang mein), yu-sheng and jai are standards at our house for lunar new year. regards, trillium

I think you could also use them as a somewhat chewier substitute for lontong in Indonesian cooking. regards, trillium

Please please please. It's definitely possible to be allergic (not a true allergy, but a genetic inability to metabolize) to certain amino acids. You Please please please what??? I can't figure out why you're quoting me. I thought I was talking about the molecular biology of taste and how there is a lot of free glutamate in things we eat besides Chinese food. I'm no physician, and would never claim that you couldn't be allergic to anything. My offer for reviews was for the ones done by research scientists on G-protein coupled taste receptors found on tongues and nothing more. regards, trillium

Hey, there's more to this board then Seattle... in my town, nobody beats Ken's Artisan Bakery. He doesn't mess around much with frou frou ingredients that can hide mistakes. A close second is Grand Central which is in Seattle too. I like it that you can buy a really good loaf of bread at the grocery store. Lot's of people here love Pearl but I'm not one of their fans. Lately, we think our house has the best bread in town. regards, trillium

No, no, the consortium would really frown on adding MSG (in other words, free glutamate, it separates from the sodium ion in solution ie, when it gets wet in food) to Parmesan cheese. I'm saying it naturally occurs in significant amounts in many aged foods (scientists will call it decay, not aging), including parmesan and other grating cheeses (aged gouda...yum) and meat products like aged steaks or salami. As for actually tasting glutamates, many can, but whether a specific person would depends on the receptors they have in their tongue specifically and also what else is around when the glutamate hits them (some mononucleic acids like IMP and GMP increase the response to glutamate, curiously enough, they're also present in aging cheeses and meats). Just like any other taste there will be hypotasters and non-tasters. Hypotasters can taste the umami flavor in more dilute solutions of msg then regular tasters. The biological sigificance of tasting umami (from the japanese umai = delicious) is considered really high, right up there with sweet. By others I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean D-glutamate vs. L-glutamate, or various salts of glutamate? There is no difference between the added free glutamate and what occurs naturally in a product, they're the same thing, free glutamate. There is a difference in what else is in a naturally aged food and a solution that just contains msg. In an aged food you'll get lots of other flavor goodies like I mentioned above (IMP and GMP). There are tons of papers coming out on the biology of taste, I'd be happy to recommend a few reviews if you're really interested, but it might be too technical for most foodies. regards, trillium

Sure they do, but plenty also swear by the use the first knuckle line on your finger method to determine the correct amount of water to add to the rice. How often does that really work? My Asian friends are pretty equally divided into the rice cooker and no rice cooker camps. The non-rice cooker people are very self-righteous about their nonricecookerness. I love my rice cooker and would give up my standing mixer, food processer, toaster and mandoline before I gave up the rice cooker. My best friend gave it to me when I moved from SF, saying "your curries were great but you cook rice like a whitey". It's a little cheapie Aroma brand that is still going strong 9 years later about 450 lbs of rice later. The partner uses it too, but avoids it when he's making rice for Hainanese chicken rice or nasi lemak because he says it's not real when you do it in the rice cooker. regards, trillium

I'm surprised no one as brought up the fact that many cuisines besides Chinese or Japanese find a way of adding free glutamate to their food to enhance flavors. A nice aged grating cheese from Italy? My favorite food chemist says it has at least 1% free glutamate (and the rest is nearly all fat!). Seaweed? Fish sauce? Soya sauce? Bonito? Aged meats? All have significant amounts of free glutamate. Partially hydrolyzed vegetable protein (you see this in almost every processed food ingredient list)? Plenty of free glutamate in solution! Our love of free glutamate has a biological basis. As we find out which receptors are responsible for transmitting the signal of "taste" to our brain we know more and more about the actual biology of taste. Heterologus receptors, depending on their makeup, specifically recognize a single distinctive taste, like sweet or umami. We have receptors that can "taste" the amount of glutamate in what we're eating and most people's brains think free glutamate in food is a bonus, something to look out for in a positive way. I like to speculate on why we like to eat things with a discernable amount of glutamate in them, maybe because glutamate is the key excitatory neurotransmitter in our brain and our bodies just can't get enough...but now I really digress. regards, trillium

I don't think you'd run into any resentment, just some amusement at your expense perhaps. My partner is ethnic Chinese from Singapore. He always snickers in SE Asian restaurants when someone insists on eating rice off a plate with chopsticks. What I've learned about chopstick manners is pretty simple. If it comes on a plate or banana leaf eat it with the spoon and fork method or your fingers, depending on where and how you're served. If it comes in a bowl use chopsticks and if it's a soupy noodle thing use chopsticks and an Asian spoon. Use chopsticks for dry noodle dishes whether they're on a plate or bowl. No stabbing food with the chopsticks allowed, but he encourages my mum to use her fingers when a dumpling is too slippery for her to pick up. My colleagues from Tokyo didn't like the way I dipped my sushi in soya, they wanted me to do it fish side down, so that no grains of rice were left in the soya (bad luck, looks like tears) but they didn't care if I used my fingers or chopsticks to get it to my mouth. regards, trillium

hi there, I'm wondering how you feel about the availability (or lack thereof) of liquors on a state-by-state and country-by-country basis. The selection of available liquors in some states in the US is truly dreadful. Further, there is the frustration of trying to find certain liquors used in cocktails that are just not widely distributed in the US (like maraschino) or were distributed but are no longer (like Amer Picon) or just aren't even available here at all (like Cinzano's Orancio). If you could pretend that you didn't travel internationally, but liked to make and drink a wide repertoire of cocktails, how would you cope with a lack of distinctive ingredients? regards, trillium

I think you might have misunderstood their website. Today, at least amoungst the homebrewers I know, a "steam" beer usually refers to a lager yeast used to ferment the wort at warmer temperatures then you would use for an actual lager (vs. an ale). Sometimes it gets called a "California common" instead of "steam". regards, trillium

Trillium- I think you might have Chez Panisse Cafe and Cafe Fanny mixed up. (Unless an upstairs dining room has opened at Fanny in the past year or two.) Chez Panisse and Chez Panisse Cafe occupy the same building (cafe upstairs, restaurant downstairs) on Shattuck Avenue. Cafe Fanny is down on San Pablo, sandwiched between Kermit Lynch and Acme Bakery. They have no table service, and serve only breakfast and lunch--wonderful cafe au lait, simple sandwiches, poached eggs, etc. snip You're right, I did. I was referring to Chez Panisse Cafe, not Cafe Fanny. I liked it almost better than the downstairs, but I've only been once. Never made it to Cafe Fanny. As for who has the best restaurant, I can't really comment, but I enjoyed yours. I hated, hated, hated the upscale food scene in Chicago, so I figure that what I like the best isn't really what other people like. To tell you the truth, I'm not sure I could even pick a single favorite restaurant for just myself, but I think Chez Panisse wouldn't be it if I could...I'd never turn down a meal there, though! On the other hand, some of the Chez Panisse cookbooks would make it into my top 10 favorite cookbooks, I couldn't live without CP Desserts. regards, trillium

Your response made me giggle. At Chez Panisse, restaurants and food are political! Ok, without politics....I've been to Chez Panisse 4 times in the last 10 years and once to Cafe Fanny. I always go in the spring and summer, since I'm not a big root vegetable fan. Of the four times I ate downstairs I had one indifferent meal as you described and the rest ranged from excellent to ephemeral. It's too bad you were presented with a bad meal on your first visit. The one that was not so great was not the most recent one. At one of the excellent meals, I had the best wine/food pairing by a server ever. I wish I had written down which wine it was, it had this amazing anise component that complemented the fennel tones in the poached beef perfectly. They've also been very accommodating when we bring our own wine or done 1/2 glass pours so we could have a different wine with each course. As for the tipping thing, at one meal my father, who was paying, didn't realize that the tip was included because he didn't really examine the bill and added a tip to the tip line. Our server came over to our table, put her hand and his shoulder and said in a low voice "there is already a 15% service charge added to the bill, I don't think you really meant to add this much extra, right?" and showed him the bill. He agreed and changed the amount. I wonder why you are commenting about being served French cheese but not commenting about all the French wine on the wine list. For that matter, the tea on the tea list is from India, Sri Lanka, China and Taiwan. Do you feel this also goes against the policy of concentrating on local producers? I ate at Cafe Fanny on my most recent visit. The food was great, in fact, I like the atmosphere better up there then down stairs, where I feel like people are too serious and dressed up and stuffy (different perspective, I guess). My most serious foodie friend who lives in Paris right now makes a point of going there whenever she is in the bay area too. regards, trillium

What a great idea to go to a Chinese herbal store for supplies! We buy things at Chinese herbal stores for tonics and cooking, but it never occured to me to buy amaro supplies there (duh). I was going to buy stuff at health food stores (Limbo has a good selection here in Portland) but they didn't have all of the ingredients so I was contemplating mail order. I'll also try to make it to Basta's and drop your name to Marco so I can have a peek in his book. Is he there all the time? I get the Lucano (and a nice selection of other amari) at Sam's Wine in Chicago. I had no idea I was so spoiled about my liquor stores until I moved to Oregon. It's just one step out of prohibition here! Anyway, Sam's has great prices on almost anything you can buy in the US (except HangerOne vodkas, but I don't care because I don't drink vodka) and we did a big order during their wherehouse sale so it made up for the shipping fees. I'm glad you like the Nonino, I was disappointed with the di Serraville and was worried the Nonino was going to be a dud too. regards, trillium

I was asked in another thread to start something on making an amaro, since I mentioned I was going to try. My favorite amaro, Amaro Lucano, has a very nice website where I read up on some of the herbs they use. For a basic idea of proportions of bitter herbs to sweet ones, I found a miningco article on infusing liqueurs very useful (beware of all the cookies and bots they write onto your hard drive). I'm going to try out Kyle's recipe, but add some angelica and wormwood to the infusion, because I already know that I really like the taste of angelica in my amari. Depending on how things smell, I may take out a few ingredients he calls for, I haven't decided. I would love to hear of any other resources people have found to make amari at home. regards, trillium

Hmm. I can tell you what nocino doesn't taste like. It doesn't taste at all like other nut liqueurs like frangelico or amaretto. It has a more herbal taste, since you use the green walnuts in their shell, followed by a more typical "walnut" taste. There is a significant amount of tannins, which the sugar sort of compensates for. Maybe a little bitterness as well? It needs to age longer than citrus based liqueurs to get really good, I think. It's black-green in color and has hints of whatever else you decide to add ( I like to go very easy on the other flavors). It's something that to me is perfectly suited to drinking in cold months, but I wouldn't really be crazy about having it in hot ones. You need a very sturdy cleaver or small hatchet to wack the nuts into quarters. We have an antique thiers-issard meat cleaver that could fell a small tree. It worked perfectly. regards, trillium

I can't remember...did they call for ketchup or tamarind in their recipe? Most of their Asian recipes make me wince, so I tend to ignore them. regards, trillium

I love amaros, which I think is what you mean by single-producer vermouths? Amaro Lucano is my favorite. Carpano's Antica formula red vermouth is really good too, and a pretty decent deal. I like it better than Punt e Mes. Antico amaro di Serravalle I wasn't so crazy about, it was a little sweet for me, and we still haven't cracked open the bottle Amaro Nonino yet. You can drink them pretty much however you like. Sometimes I drink them neat, at room temp, sometimes I use them in place of regular sweet vermouth in cocktails (they make a much nicer manhattan) and sometimes I drink them on the rocks with a slice of lemon or the same with a splash of mineral water. regards, trillium

From what I can tell of nocino, everybody's recipe is the most traditional, it just depends on whose family you talk to! It has really ancient roots, there are old recipes where you make it according the the equinox and all that. There are contests for the best one in a village too, and some family recipes are top secret. Anyway, I like it with a little tiny bit of cinnamon and clove and the peel of 1 lemon for my 29 walnuts (or thereabouts, but it has to be an odd number). I've heard of versions with coffee and black pepper too. I just strained my limoncello last weekend. Yum, now it just needs to age. Do you put the juice in yours? Another good one to make this time of year is "44". I take 1 orange or two small tangerines (this year it was clemintines) and slit them and insert 44 coffee beans into the fruit. I also throw in any leaves and stems I can find, 1 liter of vodka and 1/4 c of demerra sugar. You're supposed to let it sit 44 days, but ours always ends up being closer to "88" because we forget it's in the closet. After talking to my friend's dad from Pisa, I made a lemon verbana liqueur that tasted like utter crap when it was first finished, but now, about 4 years later it's really great. I'm planning on tackling an amaro next, I've tracked down most of the ingredients. regards, trillium

You should be jealous of the bay area produce. In February, the farmer's market in Marin is a thing of beauty, truly. The most romantic thing ever done for me was two grocery bags of produce schlepped from Marin to Chicago in late February, when I was pining for something other than chard or kale. But we do have it pretty good here. The farther east you go, the grimmer it gets in winter months. I'm glad I'm not the only one who goes bonkers over the way Chris writes. The other thing that drives me crazy is the handy tips page or whatever it's called, it seems filled with things I already know how to do or things so anal retentive I wouldn't bother worrying about them (solutions for the little bit of pepper that the pepper grinder leaves on the countertop for instance). The other person in the house rants whenever they do an Asian ingredients taste test; he went nuts when they tested soya sauce by eating it on rice! But then, he goes crazy if someone uses Japanese soya in a Chinese dish. Yes, we have 5 different bottles of various types of soya at our house. I get CI mainly for the dessert recipes and some techniques (they were brining long before I even heard of Alton Brown). Most of the savory dishes I don't really care for...um, kielbasa in cassoulet? No. regards, trillium

Word is that Armandino is actually stepping out of doing so much of the physical labor and training others to do it in his place. His retirement hobby kinda got out of hand and stopped being so much fun, I think. I've been contemplating making my own pancetta too, especially when he insisted on coating it all with cinnamon for a while! The problem is, I can't find what I consider decent pork here in Portland yet. I was really spoiled buying "heritage" pig from a farmer in Indiana who let his pigs run around in pasture and eat grass instead of feed. The farmers here sell good but boring pork. It's just fresher and better quality than the stupidmarket but doesn't really taste any different. I think pancetta made with old-fashioned pork would be outta this world. regards, trillium

As a matter of fact, scallops aren't my favorite shellfish. I like shrimp better than scallops (crab better than lobster, etc), but I found the spot prawns sweeter than other prawns I've tried. I do like dessert, just not combined with my savory dish...all those things people do with fruit to ruin a perfectly good duck, goose etc. regards, trillium

I cook with both. Tapioca is a traditional Chinese thickening agent and potato starch is not. I must admit that I find all this fuss over cornstarch to be extremely silly. There's nothing wrong with it, only with the way people USE it. A far better discussion would be how to use it correctly, and how does it compare with the other thickening agents we're talking about.