David A. Goldfarb

Amazing. In New York I can get a natural supermarket chicken like Bell and Evans (better than Perdue/Tyson, but not as good as a free range small farm raised chicken) for $1.80-2.80/lb, while boneless breasts go for around $3.50-7/lb. I make stock regularly, so I always use the whole chicken.

This looks like pretty much the way I normally shop and cook at home, but I always buy whole chickens and break them down myself rather than purchasing boneless chicken breasts.

This is true. My smallest is Sitram is 26cm, and I probably wouldn't go smaller with this design.

I have a mix of solid copper saute pans and frypans and a couple of Sitram catering frypans, and with the disk bottom pans, I find it's just a matter of managing the flame effectively to avoid burning at the edges. At a certain point, it's just ineffective to turn the heat up. If the flame is too high, then a lot of heat gets directed away from the pan (which is also true for straight gauge pots and pans), and isn't being delivered to the food, so food outside the disk area may burn. If the maximum flame is kept an inch or more inside the disk, then the copper disk will distribute the heat evenly across the bottom of the pan without burning at the edges. If I want more heat than I can get within that setting, the solution is to use a bigger pan.

That looks like the Profiserie/Pro 1 line. Without seeing the bottom, you can tell by the handles, which look like they're made from an oval metal tube on the Profiserie pans.-- http://www.dvorsons.com/Sitram/Profiserie.htm On the Catering/Pro 2 pans, the handles look like they are made from a single sheet that has been curved so the cross-section would look like a "U." http://www.dvorsons.com/Sitram/SitramCookware.htm

Looking at the website, I think that's right. It looks like the Profiserie line is now called "Pro 1" and the Catering line is "Pro 2" and there is a line called "Pro 3" which has both copper and an induction compatible disk, and then there are Cybernox lines, which have a less sticky surface, and there's a pro nonstick line, and another line with more rounded designs, and there are various household lines in different styles. As far as the issue of scorching beyond the disk, that's just a matter of adjusting the flame for the size of the pan, which is a good idea no matter what kind of cookware one uses.

Eden Organics tastes the maltiest to me, and then Horlicks, and then Carnation.

That's okay. No offense taken.

I have two skillets, the 26cm and 34cm in the Catering line. The Catering line has a thick copper/stainless bottom (2.5mm copper). The Profiserie line has an aluminum bottom that I believe is suitable for induction. The catering line does not work with induction. Heat distribution is very even across the bottom of the pan, at least with the Catering line, and Sitram is easy to clean and absolutely solid. The copper is thicker than the copper in All Clad's copper core, and the construction generally feels more rugged than anything made by All Clad. The handles are also welded, so there are no rivets to get in the way of cleaning. In New York I've seen it at Bridge (which is now in NJ) and Zabar's. Dvorson's on the west coast carries the complete line.

Eric Ripert on enameled cast iron--

It's probably worth remembering that the standard methods for traveling and getting a reservation in a nice restaurant, presuming you knew where you wanted to go in advance and when you would be free, were not exactly transparent and up front. People didn't make so many long distance calls even 25 years ago as we do today, and you couldn't just go online and make a reservation somewhere or even look up a phone number in another city without going to a major library or calling information for that city, which was itself a long distance call. I suppose corporate types had budgets and secretaries to take care of such things, but otherwise, you might grease the palm of a concierge at your hotel who had connections and probably got a kickback from the restaurant for sending customers their way.

I don't see why not. The cure preserves the meat. You could have probably just left it refrigerated in the cure. I've kept a cured corned beef in the refrigerator for three months or so. Over a period of about four weeks, the meat becomes progressively saltier and requires more desalting before cooking, so after one week in the cure, you might just rinse the salt off the surface, but after three weeks, you might soak it overnight. It seems to stabilize after about four weeks. I suspect that a pork belly for bacon would behave in a similar way.

I can recall one evening at Cendrillon in Manhattan when Ossabaw pork was the featured item on a special menu, and the chef, Romy Dorotan, told the same story. They got the whole pig and saw the thick layer of fat and realized they weren't going to have enough meat for the sold-out dinner service. They supplemented with ribs from another heritage pork breed, and all was well.

It was another era. The most it got him usually was the privilege of paying for dinner and a good story.

Horlick's is the best powder, but Eden Organics malted barley syrup is really maltier. It has the consistency of molasses.

Sounds fantastic. I think I'd be stuffed from breakfast for the rest of the day.

In the days before computerized reservations and the internet it was apparently possible to present oneself as a regular and get some special attention. My father was particularly good at this. He and my mother owned a jewelry store in Cleveland and used to come to New York on business once or twice a year, and if there was a restaurant he wanted to try, he would approach the maitre d' with a certain degree of familiarity and say something along the lines of, "I'm sorry we didn't call ahead, but it was such a long day, and you know how much my wife loves the stone crabs. She just had to come here tonight, so if you could squeeze us in, we don't mind waiting. We'll just sit at the bar and have a drink." The worst that could happen would be that they wouldn't get a table, but surprisingly, this ruse often worked. Once the restaurant manager came out and said, "I'm so sorry doctor, we don't have your usual table tonight, but let me take care of your drinks, and we'll have another table right away." He never found out who the doctor was that he looked like, but he managed to hold up appearances through dinner.

I once had dinner at Le Cirque with a regular who spent a fair amount on fine and rare wines when they were still at the Helmsley Palace (or was it called the New York Palace by then? anyway, same hotel), and I didn't get the sense that we were getting a lot of comps, though Mr. Maccioni greeted us cordially and quickly ushered us to the bar while we waited for the rest of the party to arrive. Our host ordered a fairly simple dish that wasn't on the menu as I recall, because I suppose that if Le Cirque is your neighborhood diner, sometimes you just want a simple meal prepared well, and the kitchen had no problem with his request. He was a wealthy enough person that free desserts and such were irrelevant, but he enjoyed being recognized and welcomed as a frequent guest and getting a table quickly any time he wanted one.

It's looking that way. I've seen $5.88 (Chinese market, probably Canadian), $5.99 (Fairway, Canadian), $6.99 (local Italian market, Long Island lobsters), and $8.50 (Long Island lobsters direct from the fishermen at the Union Square Greenmarket) a pound in the last month or so.

No sooner do I post this than Kodak announces the end of Kodachrome-- http://www.kodak.com/global/en/professiona...alFilmPKR.jhtml Dwayne's will continue processing it through the end of 2010, so shoot it while you can.

I like the bare wooden table. Placemats seem like clutter to me. I clean it regularly and occasionally rub it down with fine steel wool. The table is nothing special, and eventually we'll get a nicer one and will use our current table as a work table or maybe as extra counter space in the kitchen.

The most I've gotten out of being a regular is at the recently closed Filipino fusion restaurant, Cendrillon, a block or so away from FCI on Mercer St. just north of Grand. My wife is Filipino, and I'd heard about it, so we tried it in the late 1990s, maybe a year or two after they had opened. When we got married in 1999, we asked Romy Dorotan, the chef and owner with his wife, Amy Besa, to make his chocolate macadamia nut sansrival (Romy's spin on a popular Filipino version of a dacquoise) as our wedding cake. We continued to eat there regularly, and Romy and Amy would always come and chat, and it turned out that my wife's family knew some of Amy's family, and Amy's mother had been one of my wife's mother's professors. We brought friends there who became regulars, and aside from the extra ice creams and special dishes Romy would bring us, Romy and Amy really have become good friends. I think they were that way with a lot of the regulars who came to the restaurant, and they created a real community of artists, writers, academics, and local merchants who met through Cendrillon. On the last night they were open, the place was packed with regulars and friends all seated at communal tables. Here are some snapshots that convey some of the atmosphere-- http://www.echonyc.com/~goldfarb/cendrillon/ While their next restaurant, to be called "Purple Yam," in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn is under construction, their schedule is a bit more flexible than it was while they were running Cendrillon, so we had them and a mutual friend over to our place for dinner this past weekend. Info on the opening of Purple Yam can be found at their website, www.cendrillon.com, and I also highly recommend their cookbook, Memories of Philippine Kitchens.

Hey, another Kodachrome fan! I shot four rolls of K64 with my Canon "New" F-1 (which hasn't been so new since 1983) just last week and am waiting for it to come back from Dwayne's. I prefer film really, for most things, but for a quick food shot for the web, I'll use the 40D.

Thanks, Doc. JPEGs degrade every time the image is saved, but if you just open the image to view it and don't save it, nothing will happen to it. For longer term digital file preservation (a big can of worms), TIFF is better than RAW, because RAW file formats tend to be proprietary, so the software you use to manipulate a Canon or Nikon RAW file today is less likely to be easily accessible in 25 years than something that can read TIFF files. This also presumes that the data is regularly migrated to easily readable storage media as older media become outmoded. For important images, it's not a bad idea to store multiple formats and make the best archival prints you can, because prints are "human readable," and as long as they are well preserved, can be duplicated by any imaging technology that becomes available in the future.

I've always understood that hot water can carry more debris and impurities from the pipe system between the heater and the faucet than cold water, so I wouldn't use hot water for cooking or food. This is not true, though, if you have a hot water heater at the tap.