David A. Goldfarb

I like to use a ripe tomato, myself, for this purpose.

I enjoy dining out alone. I usually find myself doing it when I have to attend some event in the evening after the dinner hour, but there isn't enough time between work and the event to justify commuting home. I'll usually take it as an opportunity to check out a new restaurant or to order something my wife is allergic to (we usually try to get things we can share, if we're going out together).

I'm more likely to look at the food than the gizmos, though a kitchen with more design than substance isn't a good sign. You can tell when people are cooking. They've got stuff in the fridge, and they feel natural in the kitchen.

Just read the article (thanks for the link, Mitch), and I think "increasing" is the key word here. The article is mainly about Ferran Adrià and how all the experimentation and avantgarde technique is grounded in a basic love and feel for food and good ingredients, and the implication about "the increasing number of chefs who can't" cook, is maybe that the celebrity culture of cuisine, the proliferation of culinary academies, the (perhaps necessary) emphasis on management, marketing and business over food, and the fascination with the whiz-bang science of modernist cuisine, is turning out people in the food industry (I don't think this is about the semantics of "chef" vs. "cook") who lack that basic aesthetic sense and love for food, and all the science in the world isn't going to help them. It's the ol' Platonic knowledge vs. inspiration gambit.

Nice!

I also prefer fresh tomatoes when they're in season, but that isn't the case for most of the year. I heard an interview with Batali once that said that the reason that he preferred canned tomatoes for sauce even when tomatoes were in season was that they came peeled, and that it was unacceptable to have peels that felt like little slips of paper in his sauce, and it was too labor intensive to have to peel them in his own kitchens.

Are there Pomi tomatoes in cans? Pomi is a Parmalat product, and my impression was that they are more about finding ways to use the packaging than finding ways to sell tomatoes. Maybe the same tomatoes are sold in cans under some other brand, but I suspect that a big conglomerate like Parmalat is sourcing tomatoes from all over, and it would be hard to pin that down. I think the reason that Pomi tomatoes taste fresher when used in ways that take advantage of that property, is that the packaging method doesn't involve heating the tomatoes as much as canning.

I think the Pomi tomatoes have an advantage when you want to use them in a dish that doesn't cook for a long time, like a quick sauce with basil and olive oil that takes five minutes just to warm up the tomatoes without cooking them long enough to release a lot of water. For a sauce that cooks for a long time and reduces, it's more important to have a higher quality tomato, and the fresher, less-cooked taste of a tetra-packed tomato is going to be lost anyway.

From market... ...to table-- The shrimp from Keawa Nui Shrimp Farms were tossed with sesame oil, local tangerine, crushed red pepper, soy sauce, garlic, ginger, Hawai'ian salt and black pepper and grilled. The green vegetable is local alogbati (aka "Malabar spinach"). Short grain brown rice, Leffe Blonde.

Oxo makes some utensils like this. I have this spatula, which is very thin flexible metal sheathed in silicone, for use with teflon and tin-lined copper pans. It works pretty well for fish, as long as the pan isn't too small.

Market day is Saturday on Moloka'i, but Keawa Nui Shrimp Farms has their truck out on Sunday morning.

Today on Moloka'i: sweet onions, small Philippine-style mangos, alogbati.

Chicos, apple-bananas, tomatoes, sweet onions, watermelon, and a dozen medium brown eggs today at the Moloka'i farmer's market, not to mention a bucket of plastic sand castle molds from the local Tupperware lady. Had to go to the grocery store to find the local purple yams.

My grandmother made fried chicken with cornflake crumbs (which could be purchased in that form). Other crushed things that are crunchy to begin with like matzo meal or cracker crumbs also make really crispy breading.

Easy-Off. The lye will dissolve the grease without harming the enamel, and you can just wipe it off with a sponge. Cleansers have abrasives. The question is whether the abrasive is fine enough to polish the surface in question and make it shinier than it is or whether it is coarser and will make it duller.

I'm with Blether on this one. I consider the sink clean enough for cleaning dishes, and likewise clean enough for washing vegetables that have come out of the ground. As I clean them, I take them out of the sink and put them on a clean board or in a colander or bowl. If I have to do something like washing five pounds of sandy spinach, I'll clean the sink out more thoroughly than usual and fill it with water.

No modification required.

I sample at a cheese shop or a deli, or if a shop like Fairway puts out six types of olive oil for comparison, or apple slices or honey at a farmers' market, but I'm not interested in sampling processed food products at a supermarket.

I just got one of the Tovolo King Cube silicone trays to try out from Sur La Table (around $7-8), and I like it. Six big cube-shaped cubes to a tray. I remember my grandparents had these light green rubber or maybe some other kind of flexible plastic spherical novelty ice molds called "Ice Cubos" that must have dated from the 1960s. There were six spheres to a group, and each one had a small hole in the top to fill them up, and you could stretch the plastic to pop them out through the holes when they were frozen.

Once you've soaked off what you can: Easy-Off Heavy Duty oven cleaner. It won't dull the surface, and it takes hard black polymerized grease right off with no scrubbing required.

I had a housemate from Hereford, and I recall he said that he let the toast stand for a moment before buttering it so that it would crisp up. It seems like a trivial thing to remember after 20-odd years, but it was so surprising at the time, I haven't forgotten it.

I've made fish aspics, extracting my own gelatin from calves feet. In Poland and perhaps in other East European countries dishes like trout in aspic are not so unusual.

I think it's time for restaurants to up the ante and come to the table with an armful of giant spice mills. Why not offer a variety of types of pepper? And several freshly ground salts? And cardamon? And allspice?

In Hawai'i "Hamburger Steak" is still standard fare--two burgers with onions and brown gravy, two scoops rice and one scoop of macaroni salad is the typical configuration.

I open the windows, turn on the fan, and just try to keep up with the grease as best I can.