David A. Goldfarb

I'm the only one who cooks particularly in our home, so I don't have to worry about anyone messing up the cookware. In fact I'd be delighted if someone tried occasionally. I've been obsessive about knife sharpening lately. I can sympathize with the "technique obsession" there. I have one knife that belonged to my father that I've been reshaping. It's pretty much there, but I'm still getting the curve just right. I've reshaped a few other worn knives, but none so far gone as this one. I posted about it on the family blog a few months ago-- http://familyoffood.blogspot.com/2009/07/dads-knife.html

About half of my freezer is filled with film and photographic materials. The rest is stock, various bags of bones and trimmings that go into stock, things like bacon and fatback, demi glace, small containers of various sauces and braising liquids, some meat/chicken/fish usually, and ice--not necessarily all at the same time though. For instance, when I get a large coop purchase of beef, I'll try to use up other things to make space. In the winter I tend to keep bags of frozen peas and frozen corn on hand, but otherwise, I don't keep frozen vegetables. Short term, I might have some Chinese dumplings or tortellini in the freezer from time to time. Also ice cream or sorbets as I make them.

You must be using very lean bones. I guess the beef bones I use tend to have some fat on them, and there might be other beef trimmings involved, or after simmering for 8-12 hours a coarse straining and chilling overnight and removing the fat, I may make a boiled beef dish using more beef in the stock on the second day before straining and reducing it, so I'll get around 4-5 cups of fat from that 13 quart pot of stock. I don't skim the fat while it's cooking, though I do skim scum that rises to the top. I take it all the fat off after it's chilled. For chicken stock, I'm using backs, necks, and trimmings and those put out quite a bit of fat, and after making the stock, I usually poach another whole chicken in the stock to strengthen it, and that renders more fat. Chicken fat makes the best caramelized onions and adds good flavor to other sauteed or roasted vegetables. I've also made confit from chicken legs in chicken fat.

I'm still using CS2. I should probably upgrade to CS4, but there are only one or two new features that I'm actually interested in--mainly Photomerge for 16 bit images.

I get most of my rendered beef and chicken fat from making stock. I let the stock cool, remove the fat layer and heat it to frying temperature to boil off the water, strain it through cheesecloth, and store in a plastic or ceramic container in the refrigerator.

I usually try to compose as much as I can in the camera, so I don't have to crop. If you're shooting small format digital or 35mm, you want to use as much of the sensor or film area as possible to get as much image quality as you can. With that particular setup, I don't think the space around the plate is providing much in the way of informative context, so I'd go tight, something like this-- Another thing to think about with all that white and the marble tabletop, is that your camera's meter only understands middle grey (some modern meters try to be mind readers to understand other things, but they don't tend to think about still life much), so it will try to average out the tones in the scene and make the best guess. If you've got a lot of white in the frame, it will try to render detail in the white, but since the food is dark and digital sensors have a fairly limited tonal range, you're not getting as much detail as you could in that brown sauce, which is the subject of the photo, not the table. If you frame it tighter to begin with, the camera will meter for the food, not the table. You may notice that I used the curve adjustment in Photoshop to draw out a little more shadow detail and raise the highlight values a bit for more sparkle. I also sharpened the image slightly, because there is a little motion blur. It's best to use a tripod, when you can, but it's not always practical in a restaurant, so anything you can brace the camera against can help.

I don't let the summer keep me from braising, if I feel like braising. People braise in all kinds of hot climates. I made chicken cacciatore about a week ago, shortribs adobo earlier in the summer, and adobo (Filipino style) tends to beget more adobo.

Looking at that big two-handled cheese knife has me wondering about your cheese collection, Andie.

I don't stockpile canned goods either. At most I may have one or two cans of tomatoes or coconut milk at any given time. I tend not to buy many canned goods in general. Knives, well...I'm not a knife minimalist. I'm not exactly sure how i got to be a knife non-minimalist, since I don't make knife purchases very often. Once I got a whole set of Sabatier 4-star Elephant knives for $40 at a stoop sale in Brooklyn, so that pushed up the average, I suppose. After using them for several years, I decided the 10" was just too light for me, but I liked having a 10" chef's knife, so I sold it for around $85 on eBay and put it toward a Wusthof wide 10".

I have a lot of pots and pans for someone who lives in an apartment in New York, though the current apartment has a reasonable sized kitchen. I just made a quick survey, and there are 32 pieces of stovetop cookware. I'd sell off or trade some of the thinner copperware that my father bought in the 1980s, if I could, to make some space, but it's not a well enough recognized brand to sell for enough to make it worth the trouble. At the moment I've got around ten kinds of flour and two kinds of cornmeal on hand, which is probably a little excessive. Is it excessive to have five kinds of stock in the freezer (beef, chicken, veal, vegetable, and fish)?

I've been looking a bit at Julie Powell's blog, and my wife has been reading her book, and while it doesn't exactly measure up to the whole life experience of Julia Child, there's more to her story than was included in the movie. While Julia Child's desire to have a child (as it were) appears in a subtle way in the film, it's a major topic of Julie Powell's book (but not the blog, as far as I've read) that is left out of the film. I can see why it is left out, because it would have changed the focus of the story and could have added a potentially confusing plotline, but in terms of understanding the reality behind all this, as opposed to the story, it's worth knowing about. The thing I found interesting about the blog is that, after skimming the first few months entries, she's figuring out a new genre of storytelling. Of course there is a long history of public diaristic writing, but the immediacy of the interactive component of the blog is something new. A writer could publish a kind of diary/editorial in a weekly and read select responses to it over time in other publications, but the possibility of anyone sitting down and writing a blog and anyone responding to it at once is new. Her first posts are mechanical and almost perfunctory, but eventually a personal voice breaks through, and it's about her own quirks and neuroses and struggles that are manifested through her writing about the cooking project. That isn't something that's easy to translate into film, but is interesting, at least to me, on its own terms.

It's not that the typical US supermarket garlic isn't sufficiently fresh, but that it isn't particularly flavorful, like a lot of typical US supermarket produce. It's as if the scientists who have figured out how to cultivate the cosmetically perfect, absolutely flavorless Red Delicious apple have gone to work on garlic and produced something with a similar flavor profile.

Rocambole garlic from Keith's Farm, Westtown, New York, sold at the Union Square Greenmarket.

Pigeons have a very strong homing instinct, but they are also prolific breeders, so if you get rid of some of them, it isn't likely that others will arrive spontaneously to take their place, but it is likely that the ones that remain will breed new ones.

I bet Charles Ranhofer would make an even better movie subject than Escoffier.

Not yet, but I've been meaning to. The reason I tried Lobel's actually was that my father had ordered a gift certificate for my birthday. Lobel's isn't in a neighborhood that I pass through often, so it sat on my desk for about a year before I finally made it over there. Jeffrey's is an easy subway ride from where I live now in Queens, but I'm usually rushing to transfer between the M and the F trains at Essex & Delancey.

On the way home from the Union Square Greenmarket I visited Japan Premium Beef, the new washugyu beef source on 57 Great Jones St. about two or three blocks east of Broadway today. The NYT had a short writeup on the shop and what they sell-- http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/dining/10Jbeef.html --which is wet aged wagyu/Angus beef from a ranch in Oregon, sold from a pristine white modern storefront by butchers who present themselves more like waiters in an upscale restaurant or maybe retail jewelers than butchers. They don't have to do much butchering, since they are working mainly with sub-primals that have been prepared and cryovac packed for them, so unusual cuts may not be available. I got an 18 ounce New York strip steak, or a shell steak as New Yorkers call it, for my wife and myself-- Every order comes with a small wrapped cube of fat for melting in a pan or for oiling the grill. The steak I got wasn't as extraordinarily marbled as some wagyu I've seen, but the beef is well marbled and incredibly soft-- I only needed a bit of fat to oil the cast iron grill pan, which I took from the steak itself, so I rendered the extra fat cube in another cast iron pan and used it to coat some "La Ratte" fingerling potatoes and nugget carrots from Paffenroth Farms for roasting in a 425F oven for about 40 minutes-- I didn't even use salt on the roasted vegetables, and they were very tasty. I cooked the steak with some sea salt and black pepper to about 110F internal temperature, a bit rarer than I normally would, about 4-5 minutes on a side, and let it rest for ten minutes before slicing and served it with a little garlic confit and chopped parsley-- I also made a small salad with local tomatoes and Boston lettuce, and from the Greenmarket I picked up a bottle of the 2007 Martini-Reinhart Selection Cabernet Franc from Anthony Road Wines in Penn Yan, New York, which is one of the better Finger Lakes wines I've sampled. Going extra rare was a good move with this beef. It had an earthy flavor, more like grass-fed beef, but not lean and chewy as grass-fed beef can often be. I tried the standard USDA Prime porterhouse from Lobel's about a year ago, which is about the same price, similarly soft, a bit more marbled, and I preferred the flavor of the washugyu.

Katsuramuki is one of the things I always enjoy watching when the sushi chefs are between orders. You can tell the younger guys are always practicing. I saw a sushi demo by a very skilled chef, and he said there are people in competitions who make very long sheets of daikon, but for practical purposes, it only makes sense to make them as long as your available cutting surface. I've tried it with my Western knives, and it does take a lot of concentration.

Did that once when I was younger and had hot oil dripping down my arm. Ever since, I've always made sure the tongs are pointed down.

I just looked at some of the Itasan18 videos. Good stuff.

I haven't tried methylcellulose, but I wonder about cooking with a product that is also known for its laxative properties. Of course we cook with other fibrous things that have that effect, but one dose of Citrucel contains 2g methylcellulose as the active ingredient, which seems to be the same order of magnitude as food quantities.

I was planning to make some ice cream today, so I tried a variation on the orange custard ice cream with 1.6% xanthan from the _Hydrocolloids_ compilation. Curious texture--holds its shape right out of the ice cream maker, slightly phlegmy. Now I know how they make ice cream that doesn't melt. I don't think I'd do it with that much xanthan again, if at all. Since it's a custard anyway, I don't think it needs the xanthan.

This is what Elizabeth David calls a "Shooter's Sandwich," which is similar to what Escoffier calls a "Bookmaker's Sandwich." It's a hollowed out loaf of bread, stuffed with rare sliced peppery grilled steak and mushrooms and pressed overnight. I need to work on my hollowing technique and make the steak rarer next time, since this would have been better with less bread, and the bread would have held up to more meat and more juice. It could use some sauteed onions and sweet red peppers as well, but I wanted to stick to tradition for the first time on this one. Escoffier's version is heavy on the office supplies, which I suppose any bookmaker would have had handy. The sandwich should be wrapped it layers of blotting paper, tied, then waxed paper, tied again, and then pressed in a letter press. Not having clean blotting paper handy (I actually use it for drying fiber based photographic prints from the darkroom), I wrapped it in paper towels, then waxed paper, and tied it, put the bread back in the loaf pan, and put another loaf pan on top of it with a heavy counterweight from a lighting boom (another photographic accoutrement) in it, and let it rest overnight. The sandwich is then to be sliced as needed for long days at the races, hunts or other journeys. "With this 'sandwich' a man may travel from Land's End to Quaker Oats, and snap his fingers at both," according to T. Earle Welby, _The Dinner Knell_ (1932), quoted in Elizabeth David's Summer Cooking.

Or a separate Japanese knife skills course might be even better, since the existing course seems to contain a unified body of knowledge covering the major French knife techniques. I'd be interested to read a Japanese knife skills course and follow along. Meanwhile, here's a great series of demos I found demonstrating Japanese fish butchering-- http://www.suisan.n-nourin.jp/oh/osakana/e...okery/main.html

Perhaps our fearless leader is too modest to post this himself, unless I've missed it, but don't miss this segment-- http://www.travelchannel.com/Video_%26_Pho...b7fcbdfb02dde67