Kat Tanaka Okopnik

...with a minor correction. "Gochiso sama deshita".

I have found that it's simple so soft that all I have to do is pierce the skin appropriately and peel it off the bone. It is, indeed delicious, and I have switched from bagels to Japanese rice with crisp nori. However, now I am eyeing what I presume is a fat liver, and wondering if I can eat that.

I just received a whole pickled herring. (As a substitute for a dozen Oreo cookies. Yes, you should boggle.) I love pickled herring, but I've never encountered it 'en situ', as it were. I have the "what to eat with it" part handled. (I'll be making bagels tomorrow.) What's the right thing to do with this? Cut across the spine, into mini-steaks? Filets Help me, eGulleteers, you're my only hope!

Candy corn, circus peanuts... ...and li hing mui.

Has Alex Guarnaschelli always looked so...discomfited, judging this show? I liked this episode better than the first, but the first was just horrendous as far as judging went.

A McDonald's fry that has fallen to the floorboard of my car and rolled under the seat and has been sitting there for a year is still better than In-n-Out french fries. Why *is* that?! They make wonderful burgers. They make awful fries.

I remember being delighted by the name "Benriner", which was wonderfully punnish (benri-na - "So useful!"). At last, a cheap mandoline substitute. When I lived on a boat, it was the perfect extra tool.

Four weeks in a row, they've kicked off one of my favorites. I know that people constantly threaten to stop watching Top Chef, I'm seriously thinking of making sure I'm spoiled before the next two eps. Watching Mike Isabella braying is not my idea of a fun evening.

I concur with Rebecca just above. With the right producer, eggs can be astonishingly different. When I was in North Carolina last year, there was a specific purveyor whose eggs I took the trouble to reserve each week, because his eggs tasted miles better than his erstwhile partner's eggs. I think he was feeding them slightly differently. The yolks were darker, the whites were less spready, and tasted blind, just fried in the same pan...both my then-husband and I could definitely pick out whose was whose. It's not just the "home grown" vs. battery chicken difference. It's in the feed.

...but I hate OXO gadgets. Benriner...has anyone mentioned that? I love cheap Benriner knockoffs, too. At least when their cutting blades work.

I understand your skepticism - I started out with the same position. At this point, having lived with a fuzzylogic rice cooker for most of a year - those Asian restaurants are turning out the same rice every day. Which is what I used to do, pre-fuzzy logic. (I was cooking other sorts of rice on the burner.) I cook a lot more brown rice now, and other sorts of "other-than-bog-standard Jasmine or japonica". And I know I haven't scratched the surface of what it can do - haven't done porridge yet.

I read this to mean that you dont like using packaged foods, but have to for this recipe. I was some impressed! My dad's cheesecake recipe is this same one, and I agree, it has to be Philly fullfat creamcheese. I checked ingredient labels on other brands once upon a time, and there was a differene that seemed to account for the lesser result, but I dont remember what it was. Yet I can use 'light' sour cream for the topping, and its fine. I used to have the recipe memorized, I would make it so often. Oh, I see! I would gladly make some cheeses (paneer, various farmer cheeses, ricotta, mozzarella) if I could get good milk for a reasonable price. As it is, milk of sufficient quality to make good cheese is too dear to do anything other than savor as is. (I'm still on the hunt for a good soft pretzel recipe. I am definitely inclined toward making my own [whatever] when it seems feasible.) My mother once attempted to use reduced fat Philly for that cheesecake. It was a dismal, rubbery thing. I have been resentful of reduced fat products ever since, and do my best to simply curtail my intake rather than partake of gelatin and filler bulked bleah.

Is that the one where you take the chocolate wafers, smear each one with whip cream, stack them together on edge, coat with more whip, let sit until the the wafers are blissfully soft, and cut on the diagonal so you get zebra-stripes? A childhood favourite. Yes! I saw them on the supermarket shelf the other day and the picture of that cake is right on the front of the box now. I think that cake is what keeps them in business. I've never had that cake. I used to buy the package to devour them as a superior substitute to Oreo cookies. (I dislike the "cream filling".)

What seaside, I wonder? Not like any eel I've ever had, but mine have primarily been of East Asian concept if not origin. Yours do sound discouraging!

Try getting it from small local dairies. They're better than the run of the mill white blandness at supermarkets. Occasionally, you will get very lucky, and have an experience similar to one I had outside of Seven Lakes, NY, where the glass bottled milk was a revelation to me and a nostalgic reminder to my Russian-born then-husband.

Was that my beloved "one dollar, one dollar!" lady, I wonder? She usually only had one variety of anything when I stopped by at various Manhattan Chinatown visits, always with peanuts. $1.25 is still a bargain, but I'd miss the creaky bark of "one dollah!" (And nothing more in any language that I could discern.) All that variety looks compelling, but I'd need to round up friends to share in the bounty. I'd want one of everything.

?! Kouign, where did you get "Kat makes all her own cheese" from what I wrote? What I mean is that I can use any sour cream for the top, but the cream cheese for that cheesecake *must* be Philly Cream Cheese by Kraft, or it just doesn't come out right. This is bizarre to me, but empirically true.

What sort of eel are you eating that it's bony shoe leather?! Every eel I've had has been an unctuous delight - tender and rich in flavor. (I've never had jellied eels, but I can't imagine they'd be very tough, either.) For now, sea squirts (as encountered in Korean monkfish stew) are on my never-ever-again list, as are sea cucumbers. But a lot of my very favorite foods are on everyone else's never ever list. (And I've indoctrinated my children in the cult of natto.)

Apparently this is what makes me forever unAmerican despite a grandmother born in California - I really dislike tuna noodle casserole, chicken a la king, and the like. Fish in cream soup sauce features in my nightmares. ObTopic: Yes to back-of-the-bag chocolate chip cookies. And I think my mother's beloved sour cream top cheese cake originally came from a box of Kraft Philadelphia Cream Cheese. (I have become less and less enamored of packaged foods as I get older, but I have found to my dismay that nothing else will do for that particular cheesecake.)

Maybe it's my age, maybe it's something else...but I don't understand the aversion to the term "foodie". I'm not a gourmet, or a gourmand, or "a food enthusiast", I'm someone who has had long distance friendships cemented by a love of geeking about food. I had a marriage that had a passion for food as one of the cornerstones. Street food, humble food from faraway places, handmade noodles from hole-in-the-wall purveyors...it's not all about the Veuve Cliquot and foie gras, although I won't turn away from that when I can afford it, either! I don't do well when partnered with people who eat to live. I don't understand why there's supposed to be any shame associated with that. Frankly, I find terms like "food enthusiast" to be too much "doth protest too much", and am more averse to the workarounds to "foodie". (Then again, I don't get the "don't call me a Trekkie!" defensiveness, either. I'll admit that my friends used to say "Trek fan" to get away from the entire Trekkie/Trekker divide, but it wasn't out of a sense of shame over the enthusiasm.)

...not everyone lives in a place with basements! (And as far as Americans complaining about the rising costs of food...maybe you'd be cranky too, if your healthcare costs were what ours are. But we're getting far afield from the topic.)

Having grown up with the Japanese and Korean ones, I found American hard candies to be not worth the potential cavities when I was a child.

Last time I had a superabundance of cilantro, I smashed two cloves of garlic with an equal amount of kosher salt (until fluffy) and then threw that mix into a food processor with the cilantro leaves, no stems. It disappeared happily over a bowl of steamed baby potatoes.

I have a cousin in Japan who has either IB or celiac. Food allergies by definition are a first world problem. Lacking either medical care or food choices, people die of the issue rather than surviving to suffer and complain. That said, I do think that a neurotic attention to cleanliness & an overuse of cleaning chemicals can lead to body dysfunction. I ask for salad dressing on the side because many places drown the salad.

Hmm...I think I "cut apart" a raw chicken into parts, I "carve" a cooked chicken into parts, and I "hack up" a cooked chicken into Chinese-stile across the bone pieces with a cleaver. Breaking down is for cardboard boxes.