David A. Goldfarb

I tried Han Gawi on 32nd between 5th and Madison for a vegetarian business lunch, and it was ideal for that. A very elegant place where you take off your shoes and sit on cushions on the floor, but there is a well under the table, so it's not exactly sitting on the floor. Lots of great mushroom dishes and kabocha items, pa jun, cold ginseng juice, in a very calming atmosphere amid an otherwise hectic neighborhood. Finally got to Keens Steak House a couple of weeks ago for a most definitely non-vegetarian business lunch, and it was great and quite reasonable for lunch. There are lunch entrees for $20-35 with a beef dish and a vegetable, as well as larger steaks from the dinner menu. I normally don't order the filet mignon in a steakhouse, but it was one of the more attractive lunch items available with a choice of sauces (I got it au poivre) and it was definitely one of the better steaks I've had in the city. It's a different style from Peter Luger's, so not really comparable, but a really fine steak. Today's discovery was No. 7 Sub on Broadway just below 29th St.--excellent interesting subs for $9. I got the fried mussels which comes on a whole grain roll with melted American cheese and frisee. The American cheese is a bit of an odd choice, but it's a great sandwich. They also have a meatloaf, arctic char, eggplant parm, General Tso's Tofu, maybe a half dozen or so choices, and house-made sodas. I'll be returning often.

Maitake are hen-of-the-woods or sheepshead mushrooms in North America, and in French Coquille En Bouquet, Pied De Griffon, Polypore En Bouquet, Polypore En Touffe, Polypore Feuillé, and Poule De Bois, so why not? I think they go nicely with lamb, beef, and veal. The flavor is kind of earthy, and they aren't slimy, but the texture is different from more common mushrooms with a stem and a cap. A simple way to prepare them is just to brush with olive oil and a little salt and roast them briefly (if you overdo it, they will shrink very rapidly, but can become a nice crunchy topping--don't ask me how I know).

Well, he's not handling sharp knives yet, but anything I did was in consultation with the chef.

A friend brought us a pumpkin from a farm near his place in the Adirondacks, and our son (who will be 4 in December) wanted to make a pumpkin pie, inspired by the funny Mr Potato Head style Halloween pumpkins a couple of doors down.

"Rethermalized"? I believe that one belongs on the "culinary apocalypse" thread. Or at least the "death of the English language as we know it" thread. Rethermalized. That just makes my eyelashes hurt. Does it mean, like, "warmed up"?

They're a nice garnish on pumpkin soup.

I think in most NYC diners and corner sandwich shops (AKA "delis," which doesn't necessarily mean "Jewish delis" in New York as it would in many other U.S. cities), a "regular" would be a coffee with milk and two sugars in a blue paper cup with an image of the Parthenon in white (AKA a "Partho cup"). Personally, if I get an ordinary coffee, I usually like half-and-half, no sugar.

Ditto the Wondra on fish. I've occasionally used it to thicken a sauce or a stew when I wanted a little more thickness but was too lazy to make a(nother) roux. You can find it in pretty much any supermarket, I'd have thought, though one of those canisters lasts me for years.

Wife--hates bananas. Toddler--occasionally only eats bananas or banana smoothies. I'll sneak other fruit or juice into his smoothie occasionally.

Save the skin for cassoulet!

I've done it once, and I didn't use a casing. I suspect a casing will keep it more moist and slow down the drying process, if you want that. It seems that there are a number of kinds of air dried beef from different parts of the world that don't use a casing, so it's not a necessity, and since you're starting with a solid piece of beef rather than ground meat, I'd think it would be a challenge to size the casing to the meat and avoid air pockets.

Hen of the woods or maitake mushrooms are also nice just brushed with olive oil or melted butter and roasted.

jkarpf and I are in the same informal beef purchasing group, and I think he said most of what I would have said, but I would also add that you should be fairly specific about how you like things cut, or you might be in for some surprises. For instance, in our group we always seem to end up with the briskets cut lean, missing most of the second cut, then rolled and tied, which I think is the style of an English pot roast, instead of flat with a 1/4" of fat on top, which is more amenable to Jewish-style (at least the flat end), smoking, and barbecue. A few of us have also been wanting thicker steaks. Even as we try to use as many braising cuts as possible, which I'm completely happy to have, we do seem to get lots of burger--way more than I would buy a la carte--and that seems to be a common experience with other bulk beef buying groups I've read about. I recommend dry aging, if you can do it. We were looking into having a butcher hang the beef for four weeks before cutting it, but we weren't able to set it up for the last round.

Through a mixup at work involving two meetings planned separately with the same people, I fell into a very nice lunch today at La Grenouille in their less formal (no jacket required, thankfully, since I'd planned for something much more casual and was wearing a sweater over a turtleneck shirt) upstairs room today, originally a painter's studio and the room where Antoine de Sainte-Exupéry wrote the first few pages of _The Little Prince_. They have a prix fixe three-course lunch on the blackboard, which they don't necessarily tell everyone about unless you ask, for a very reasonable $35. Today it was a very rich and buttery butternut squash velouté, followed by a pan roasted chicken with a brown sauce, Brussels sprouts, and carrots, and a pear tart for dessert. Many very nice extras came with coffee, including gingerbread spice cookies, wonderful canelés, and candied almonds. One member of our group preferred fish and ordered the loup de mer (which can refer to a few things--black sea bass in this case) served over what looked like a very thin roesti, and she was very satisfied with it. The member of our party who made the reservation is something of a regular at lunch, and service was very attentive and friendly.

If you have an older KitchenAid, you might look for the plastic splatter shield that comes with most newer models--very useful for the moment when the cream breaks and you're on the other side of the kitchen looking the other way, and you hear that sloshing sound. Occasionally I've made butter with Milk Thistle (a farm near Ghent, New York) organic cream from Jersey cows that's just begun to turn sour--just at the point at which you start to wonder whether it will still be good tomorrow. At $7/pint, it's an absurdly expensive way to make butter, but if I've bought the cream for something else and have half of it leftover, then it's a good way to get something more out of it, and it is fantastic butter.

Saw this thread, and I'm so impressionable. Tonight's version was fairly basic-- Two dashes of Fee Bros. Bitters (angostura style) over about 1/4 tsp. turbinado sugar, selzer, 1.5 oz Knob Creek, two ice cubes, topped off with selzer, maraschino cherry. I like a slice of Seville sour orange as a garnish with the cherry but didn't have one handy.

If you can find the briefly manufactured DVSA attachment, it turns your mixer into a food processor as far as shredding and slicing (but not chopping) go. It takes the same discs as the KitchenAid 11-cup food processor, and for most things it cuts more cleanly than the rotary drum slicing and shredding attachment. The disc slicer is better for things like slicing cucumbers or shredding hard cheese, but the drum slicer is better for things like shredding a lot of cheddar or mozzarella cheese. One of the more esoteric attachments is the pea sheller. You can find them on eBay sometimes.

Much on the Fuji X100 at http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/blog_index.html Compact fixed-lens cameras often don't focus close enough for food photography, and if they do, they don't have a sophisticated enough lens to avoid visible barrel distortion at close distances, but it looks like this one will be up to the task--at a price.

I usually just carry the camera out in the open without a bag in that situation, where I know I'll only be using one lens. If I need another lens, I put it in a pocket or a little belt pouch. Just in general, I often am carrying a camera all around New York city, on the subway, on the street, wherever, out and ready to shoot. Haven't had a camera stolen from my person. Billingham does make very elegant and practical cases. I'd also recommend Urban Disguise cases made by Think Tank Photo, which are very well made, intelligently designed, and there are models that look like ordinary business or laptop cases that everyone carries in a large city. Adorama carries them.

When my wife was in the maternity ward to give birth to our son, we had a long, indeterminable wait before we could get a bed, and then after that we knew it might be a long time before she could eat again, so I went down to the cafeteria to find something substantial for her and there was this very large serving of oxtail stew probably made by the Filipino kitchen staff (and my wife is Filipina), and it was just the right thing.

I've come to like them both for different things. I grew up using an 8" Henckels, so that feels the most familiar, but the 8" carbon Sabatier takes a finer edge, so it's nice for things that need a very clean cut. I also have a German-style 12" Sabatier carbon steel knife, and at that length the lighter weight is a real plus. It's perfect for things like chopping a whole bag or two of spinach in one big pile.

French style knives, and even French-made German-style knives are often lighter than their German counterparts. My 8" carbon steel Sabatier is significantly lighter than my 8" stainless steel Henckels.

Thanks!

And here is the Ryback folder in action.

There are good photos of the Ryback Folder on the Cherusker Messer site and of various handmade examples on Wilkins' site, but here's the one I have-- Next to a Wusthof 8-inch Santuko-- The locking mechanism-- The blade after sharpening--