patrickamory

Tai bai chicken

Tastes "meaty" to me in the way that only certain vegetables do - artichoke hearts, for instance. It's hard to pin down, there's a slight bitterness and a slight sweetness but an overall complexity that is nonstop delight.

I highly recommend this Bengli okra with mustard seeds, which I first encountered via Madhur Jaffrey: http://impulsivechef.blogspot.com/2009/01/okra-with-mustard-seeds-sorse-dharush.html I could eat it by the pint.

Kim, glad to have you back, and I hope you're starting to feel better. Incapacitated or not, that is an incredibly mouthwatering gallery of photos. Can you remind me of the recipe for Mr. Kim's ham and cheese?

Anyone know a source in NYC for roosters?

If you don't want slime, the key is to dry it thoroughly before cooking. And as you will find, they are not easy to pat and wipe dry! Work at it. Stirfry whole - there are some excellent Indian (especially Bengali) preparations. It's a revelation - a truly meaty, complex vegetable. I adore okra.

Word is the Cow no longer great, so please remove that from my list. If you have the misfortune to be stuck in the Clapham/Battersea area, the starters at Soif are very good, and the wine list is better than very good.

All I know is what works, for me, here. More water proportionally always leads to better results for me. I follow Hazan's recommendations to the last detail and since I started doing that, my (dried) pasta has always been perfect. As I wrote above, YMMV.

As I've written before, with dried factory pasta, I consistently get the best results from using a very large proportion of water to pasta. YMMV.

The bolognese for sure, the roast chicken (still the absolute best recipe in my opinion!), pasta with onion, butter and tomato, the tuna pasta, so many more. And yes annabelle, agreed on dried pasta. Superior for so many applications.

mm, taking it to the next level again. Does the partridge come from that purveyor Solex that you posted about earlier?

I live in a Manhattan apartment with a windowless kitchen. When it gets really smoky, I open windows, or the door to the terrace (and disable the smoke detector temporarily). The smells are gone by the next day, or else I've gotten used to them. It's not ideal, but seems a small price to pay for being able to make tasty stir-fries. Maybe my apartment has really good internal ventilation, or else I've just gotten used to it - but it doesn't feel like a big deal. I'm hoping that maybe you might have the same experience.

Steve, really? I haven't been to Tortilleria Nixtamal but I've heard great things from people I respect. According to one of the commenters on the NYT piece, Los Tacos #1 in Chelsea Market nixtamalize the corn themselves for their tortillas. I've had fabulous tacos and tortas at Real Azteca in the Hunters Point section of the Bronx. Sure, Manhattan is full of Margaritaville style fratboy joints, and many of the taco trucks in Brooklyn and the outer boroughs use masa harina... but the same is often the case in Mexico, and I'd venture to guess, at many places in California. Perhaps more reprehensibly there are "upscale" Mexican restaurants in the city charging huge amounts for overly elaborate preparations that owe little to the rich Mesoamerican cooking traditions and ingredients, let alone the actual regional cuisines of Mexico. But you can find the same in D.F. sadly enough. As you know, I'm a huge Rancho Gordo fan, but this feels a little bit like stone-throwing without much recent experience on the ground. I know a lot of New Yorkers who have travelled extensively in Mexico, brought back indigenous ingredients of all kinds, from corn to beans - and stone-grind masa themselves with cal - and I think you know some of those people too!

Fascinating, Syzygies! I urge everyone to click on the Leipä link above - incredible food tradition stories, and a view into a different world.

FWIW, I got the 6-quart Presto a year ago. No spring valve, no nice gauge, and you have to deal with optimizing the jiggle. And I love it. Pretty much everything I've made in it has turned out perfectly, and the timings are right on. And probably 1/4 the price...

Doing great! Extremely happy with it - not a single problem.

Making celery stock for a celery risotto. Celery, onions, Chinese leeks, carrots, onions, thyme, peppercorns, bay leaf and parsley, covered with water and cooked at high pressure for 20 minutes. I have a venting PC and the apartment smells wonderful.

Thanks Xilimmns. Starting on the stock right now.

pressure cooker?

Xilimmns more detail on the celery saffron risotto please! Is it more complex than it sounds? Celery broth made by making a simple celery stock, discarding, then making a risotto with olive oil, the stock, a carnaroli or whatever and saffron carrots & peas? No chicken involved? Fish-fragrant eggplant - I'm finding the Chinkiang black vinegar dominating this too much, either I'm gonna cut it in half or allow it to cook in a bit more at the end - otherwise this turned out great:

So sad. My copy of the Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is split and half with pages falling out, many marked with notes. Her introductory comments on techniques and ingredients really helped me find myself as a cook - and they don't just apply to Italian food. Viva la strict.

I buy the stuff that smells and tastes good. I realize that sounds reductive, but it appears to me to be the only solution. Recently I've been buying Tunisian and Lebanese oil with good results, and they're cheap to boot. I also have had good luck with Murray's Greek olive oil, for those of you who live in NYC. Bottling dates are printed on the back of some Italian bottles. Adulteration could potentially be happening with any of these, I suppose, but if I don't like a product then I don't buy it again. And my guess is that olive oil is just one thousands of foods that are not labeled properly (and I don't expect the US to be superior to many other countries in that respect, I'm afraid). (See the sea salt thread for more suspicions. Again, buy salts that taste good & work for you.) (Health and contamination issues, as opposed to mere misrepresentation, are a separate, if related, issue, in my opinion. I recently saw an air pollution map of the world on a well known news site, one contested of course in the comments section, that implied that a good chunk of the United States has unhealthy air, including areas outside of major metropolitan areas. We're all ingesting all sorts of poisons all the time, I'm afraid - it's the price of living in a developed world. Europe fared no better in that map. As for much of China - forget about it! Sorry if this is tangential, but the focus on olive oil seems to me to be missing the forest for the trees.)

Red braised pork [Moderator note: The original Dinner! topic became too large for our servers to handle efficiently, so we've divided it up; the preceding part of this discussion is here: Dinner! 2013 (Part 4)]

I read this - hilarious

I reverse-engineered my mother's spaghetti with meat sauce (strictly Italian-American, not Italian!) from the '70s. Strangely, she sautéed onions and garlic, browned the meat, added herbs tomatos etc. from scratch, but then dumped an entire jar of Ragu in there. I'm guessing the recipe came from the side of a Ragu bottle. This was made without any such addition, though I did put in some dried Italian Seasoning - as well as fresh basil and oregano from the garden. The secret ingredient was a pinch of pimenton de la vera. I could probably eat three or four gallons of this, so it's for the best that I don't make it all the time.