kayb

Looking forward to this one, Rico! I've had some wonderful meals in Dallas, and I order my coffee beans from Cafe Brazil. Your kitchen is beautiful, and absolutely looks as if it were worth the effort. I'm about 5 hours northeast of you, and I'm seeing some new growth in my herbs. Wondering if I can take a chance on putting basil outside yet, or if we still have some cold nights in the offing....

Road Food breakfast: I've made three trips to Memphis in past 15 days, and during one of them, I threw my gluten-free diet to the winds (I've found I can do this about once every two weeks without TOO many ill effects) and had breakfast at a little joint in Memphis called Bryant's Breakfast. I say with absolute certainty that these are the best biscuits in the entire world.

Wow. I've been reading this thread thinking what my top three or four meat dishes would be. Pulled pork barbecue. Duck confit. Pot roast. A perfect medium rare rib-eye or strip steak. Cajun style boiled shrimp. I guess those would top my list.

It has been two weeks since I read this topic (or any other one). So many marvelous meals, and I’m so very glad I went back to the last posts I read and started forward so I wouldn’t miss anything, because? Roasted grapes? SobaAddict, that has got to be the most wonderful idea I’ve ever heard in my life. (The Salad Parisienne looks pretty marvelous, as well. MM, the lobster looks lovely, but I’m intrigued by the cucumbers marinated in yogurt and curry. Details? I love a cucumber… Bruce, as a confirmed aficionado of smoked pork butt, I cringed a little at the idea of putting it in chili…and then I thought about it and decided it’d probably be pretty doggoned good. What was the verdict? Elise – love the idea of wrapping salmon in Parma ham! How long and at what temp did you cook? David – thanks for the duck pastrami Rx. I’ll be trying that one of these days. So many other gorgeous meals, if I tried to post half the ones I wanted to try (which would be, well, all of them) I’d be writing all day. I've been on the road a lot for the past two weeks, and haven't cooked much at all, but I did take time out of one trip to stop by Craig's Barbecue on U.S. Highway 70, a tried-and-true barbecue joint in the middle of the Arkansas Delta, where I had a sliced pork plate. The meat is spicy, and very smoky. It's also dry and chewy, a different style from the pulled pork you see in most other Delta 'cue joints. Beneath the onion and pickle slice is a scoop of a creamy, mayonnaisey, quite sweet slaw. The beans have more bell pepper than I'd like, but any bell pepper is more than I'd like. Craig's is just about as legendary as Jones Barbecue in Marianna, Arkansas, which recently won a James Beard Foundation "American Classics" award. And yes, that's wonderful barbecue too. I finished off dinner with a slice of egg custard pie from the Pie Shop, across the highway from Craig's. You don't have a picture because, full from barbecue, beans and slaw, I planned on taking it home with me for a snack. I made it about 10 miles, and ate it straight from its styrofoam container with the included plastic fork, while driving down Interstate 40 at 75 mph. Couldn't wait.

Godalmighty, but I love Tom kha gai. Have never attempted it at home.

Absolutely marvelous blog. As a product of a very white-bread, middle America upbringing, it had never occurred to me to consider Lebanon a tourism or culinary destination. You have changed that. Thanks for broadening my horizons. Edited to fix iPad's auto correction!

Loving this blog. What's tarator? And is it heretical to eat falafel the way I love it, with labneh, sliced cucumbers, za'atar and hummus? I just love the combination of tastes and textures.

Dear God. I'm making these tonight.

I wanted a BLT. But I have celiac disease, having recently been diagnosed, and can't eat the sourdough bread. And I didn't have any lettuce. But I had good locally-greenhouse-raised tomatos. So I sliced one thick, slathered with Hellman's mayo, added a couple strips of bacon, diced, and an over-easy egg. Voila! A BTB! (Bacon Tomato Breakfast!)

My turn tonight to cook dinner for a co-worker who recently gave birth to a big baby boy. Pot roast with onions, potatos, carrots, rosemary. Roasted broccoli with orange zest and pecans. Bread (actually, this is mine. What I took to them was from the same batch, as rolls. See blog in a day or so for details.) And pear upside down cake.

How is a grocery store chicken 'laden with antibiotics and hormones' any more honest than a Chicken McNugget? I mean, in Australia, at laest, the chicken nuggets contain chicken. It might not be top quality, free-range, corn-fed organic chicken. But it is still chicken. I'd suspect it'd be on par with the frozen whole chickens you can buy in the supermarkets. I mean, McDonald's and these stores use the same suppliers. So in short, I have as much of an idea where my tub of McNuggets comes from as I do a supermarket chicken. I fail to see how the McNuggets, for all their other failings, are dishonest by that measure. How is the guy in charge of ordering ingredients for McDonald's Australian head office any more/less dishonest than the person, presumably the chef himself, who orders ingredients for Marque/French Laundry/Noma/el Bulli? I can read the ingredients on a side of a box of Pop Tarts. It gives me a fairly solid understanding of what the Pop Tarts contain. And too, and I know I'm playing with fire with this one and touching on another issue altogether, what's the big deal about knowing what your food comes from? I mean, okay, with steak things like the animal's diet, etc determine the quality and flavour of the end product. I get that. But knowing exactly where it was raised? Knowing where my sweet potatoes come from? How many people who ask these questions or hear from TV chefs, et al that these are important questions know what the 'correct' answers are? Unless it's purely a matter of food miles/fresness, why should it matter whether my potatoes come from 20 kilometres down the road as opposed to 200 or 2000? If it's more than that, if it's a lack of trust of mass-produced/battery-farmed goods and perhaps even organic/free-range/etc labelling systems (and fair enough on that, I mean, free range in actuality isn't necessarily free range as you imagine it), then I refuse to accept that McDonald's and Woolworths are less trustworthy than, I don't know, some guy with a stall at the market selling tomatoes for $20/kilogram. Surely the only way I'll truly be able to know with 100% certainty that my fruit, vegetables and meats were 'raised right' (i.e. free of whatever 'chemicals' I deem to be unacceptable) is if I raise them myself. OK. I didn't express myself well. If I cook the antibiotic and hormone laden chicken from Kroger, I at least know it's chicken, and at some point, walked around on two feet, albeit in horrible conditions in a chicken farming operation. Just like my grass-fed beef walked around on four feet in a pasture and never met a hormone other than what it produced itself. I can still track the bite on my fork back to an animal/bird, no matter how it was raised. Ditto sweet potatos. McNuggets and PopTarts and a host of other prepared foods, on the other hand, have so many other things added in that they only vaguely resemble the alleged source. I cannot draw a straight line from the sweet blue paste in a blueberry Pop Tar to a real blueberry, whether I got it in a plastic clamshell at the grocery or plucked it from a bush at my local organic orchard/farm. Or, for that matter, from a shaped-and-formed McNugget (I mean, seriously? Couldn't it just as easily be ground pork? Or what part of the chicken did it come from, anyway?) to the bird. A sweet potato is a sweet potato. It will taste different, if it's grown in your back yard and dug at an appropriate time, than it will if it's grown on a commercial farm, dug and then housed in climate-controlled circumstances until it's ready to ship. But it's identifiable as a sweet potato. A McNugget is not identifiable as chicken, to me. Nor is a blueberry Pop-Tart identifiable as blueberries. That's all.

I don't really want the recipe...but I'd LOVE to sample the finished creation!

That is a gorgeous meal. And this has been a marvelous blog. Thanks!

I swear by Mark Bittman's fried rice recipe/technique in How To Cook Everything. It's for the most part a reheat, but you do fry long enough you get some crispy bits.

"Honest" food, to me, means knowing what's in it and where it came from. I mean, I bought sweet potatos at Kroger today. They are sweet potatos. They came out of the ground, somewhere. They do not have 87 additives, preservatives, and so on. They were probably grown with fertilizer and perhaps have come in contact with genetically modified organisms. Nevertheless, they are a sweet potato, in large part indistiinguishable from the sweet potatos we used to grow in the garden when I was a kid. I had a burger tonight; grass-fed beef that I cooked on my gas grill. I will roast a chicken later this week that I also bought at Kroger; it's probably laden with antibiotics and hormones, but nevertheless, it is a chicken, no matter how little resemblance it will bear to the farm-raised broilers I'll pick up in late March to see if there's a huge taste difference (my first venture into organic chicken). Dishonest food? Chicken McNuggets. Krystal burgers (if you are not in the southeast this won't mean anything to you). I am convinced vegetarians can eat Krystal burgers, because I can't believe there is any meat anywhere about them. That said, I want a sackful of them about once every two years. Pop Tarts. Marshmallow Creme. Or saying, "I baked you cookies," when what you did was hack pieces off the roll of Pillsbury cookie dough onto a baking sheet and put it in the oven."

There have been so many wonderful meals posted this week, I won't event attempt to call them out. With one (well,two) exceptions: Shelby and dcarch, your Fat Tuesday meals were absolutely astounding. Shelby, if you're making your own olive relish/salad for the muffaletta, and I feel pretty sure you are, I'd love a recipe. dcarch, the whole meal is gorgeous, but the pepper masks really topped it magnificently. The only thing I've cooked this week: Sous vide ribs. Not bad. I'm getting there.

Good Lord. And I just complained about a pear upside down cake because I thought it was too fussy. That's more complexity than I can handle in the kitchen -- but damn, I'd love to taste it.

There used to be -- this is a while back, so not sure if it's still there -- a place called the Wild Boar on West End that was pretty good. I'm also fond of Chappy's, on, I think, 21st, close to Baptist Hospital. Creole/Cajun place, chased out of Biloxi/Gulfport by Katrina. Well worth the visit, if for no more than the four different compound butters they bring you with your bread.

Personally,I'm intrigued by the garlic jelly.

Agreed about the hard water issue. I live in a household of garbanzo haters, so I buy the canned beans and make small batches of hummus for myself. The Philistines here wouldn't eat a falafel if I paid them. I can't even get them to eat three bean salads in the heat of summer. You gotta love those Philistines! (else you'll kill 'em.I have raised four children, three of them confirmed Philistines.) For my money, you fix a big ol' pot of white beans and ham hock, with some beans with something else for the vegetarians.

No, not caramelized at all, if I do it right: they are supposed to remain white, according to the recipe. And no beef stock on hand, alas. I'm trying to think of things I could fry them up with: presumably they will completely disintegrate, so that has to be OK in the dish. I can't think of much of anything that wouldn't benefit from that. Except maybe ice cream. Soubise, maybe? Or I'd put it into a white sauce and make a hellacious scalloped potato casserole.

That's almost exactly how I do mine. I don't make the kraut into a patty, just dry it and toss it loose on the griddle long enough that it just starts to caramelize the edges. I like to add just a (very thin) slice of good pastrami, all pulled apart, to the corned beef and I also give the meat a quick run on the griddle. I think having the meat and kraut hot from the beginning just makes the cheese that much more...melty. Good Swiss cheese in a must, but I like to add just a little grated Comte' right in the middle. The weight on top is essential in my mind. Like Jaymes said, crispy, crunchy perfection. ETA: Around here (Nebraska, home of the original) its mostly thousand island these days. I like to add just a little horseradish to a good store bought thousand island. Sounds weird, tastes great on the sandwich. Can I come eat with y'all? It'd be worth falling off the gluten-free wagon. A few years ago, when my father was ill, I would go home every weekend. One weekend he said, "I wish I could have a good Reuben." So I went to Fresh market, got the good corned beef, the good swiss, the good sauerkraut, good rye bread, took it to his house, made him a Reuben. He thought it was wonderful, and I took the makings of a Reuben to his house every weekend from then until he passed on, and I've been inordinately fond of a Reuben ever since. However, the best one I ever had was in the Senate dining room.

A few of my favorite casseroles: Squash casserole, with lightly sauteed squash and onions, cheese, cracker crumbs, white sauce. Spices of your pleasure. Enchilada pie: A 9-inch deep dish pie shell accomodates this well. Layer flour tortillas, browned beef with Mexican seasonsings of your choice, drained whole-kernel corn, drained and rinsed black beans, salsa or tomato sauce, cheese. Repeat. Tamale pie: Essentially the same ingredients, but a masa/cornmeal batter on the bottom and top. +1 on the pastitsio and the moussaka/eggplant parmesan (depending on how you wish to season your tomato sauce) The inimitable Hash Brown Casserole, one of the two remaining things for which I keep "cream of" soups in my pantry -- a 2-pound bag of hash browns, cream of chicken soup, cream of mushroom soup, caramelized onions, sour cream, sauteed peppers if you want 'em, diced and browned bacon, cheese of your choice, all mooshed up together, topped with either crumbled corn flakes or crumbled potato chips. Mainstay of many and many a church dinner-on-the-ground. And if you have not been to a dinner-on-the-ground, you have not lived.

Not sure how proper to the season it is, Memphis being much more Protestant, but Calvary Episcopal Church's annual Lenten Luncheon and Preaching series is a must-do for many in the Mid-South area. Some of the favorites include a shrimp in aspic, a "fish pudding" (which I could never bring myself to try; it looked horrible), and chicken-and-waffles, a chicken hash over waffles. I alternated between the shrimp in aspic and the waffles.

Great stuff, Chris! Thoroughly enjoyable. And, late to last night's party, kampei!