patrickamory

Was the Slanted Door a revelation?

The pressure cooker chickpeas are a revelation.

Nice salad Nickrey... wowee... is that David Thompson, or your own creation? or a combo? liuzhou - thanks! ah I see that character can be used for a piglet so that makes sense for suckling pig. btw my mother suggested 西湖猪肉汤, the last character tang being a less thick soup than geng 羹, what do you think?

A vastly disparate array of dishes from different cuisines prepared recently. First, from Chichi Wang's column on Serious Eats, West Lake Soup with pork (西湖豚肉羹, if I've got the characters right). From Zhejiang province, this is an extremely easy soup but looks pretty impressive to guests and tastes delicious: Then, travelling back in time to mid-'60s American home cuisine, the Presto pressure cooker recipe for Porcupine Meatballs, probably a surefire kid pleaser if I had kids in the house: And finally, Bengali okra with mustard seeds (sorse dharush), one of my standbys (and I recommend it without reservation to anyone who thinks they don't like okra - it was the beginning of my conversion):

It's a Martin Yan recipe. Involves sambal oelek among other ingredients.

Shane and Kim: amazing duck and kielbasa, thanks! A Young-Dunlop 1-2: Genghis Khan beef and dry-fried green beans

I suppose I meant in comparison with her other two cookbooks. It doesn't have the depth, and my guess is it's meant to be less threatening. As you say, this doesn't mean it doesn't have insights. However I was given the Grace Young book on wok cooking for Christmas, and the tips on technique on that have done more for my Chinese cooking than this new on Dunlop. Somehow I expected more from her. That doesn't mean it's bad or dumbed down, as I said - just not the next level that for whatever reason I was hoping for. Still, as you say, it seems like a good book - I'm excited to cook from it.

Entrees under $25 and non-exotic is going to be tough right there. If you travel a bit... Chez Napoléon on W. 50 between 8th and 9th is a time-travel French bistro that would fit the bill.

I love reverse-engineering Soba's creations from the photos and the open-ended descriptions. It's like working from recipes by Patience Grey or Elisabeth David - they are invitations to experiment. And thus especially useful for a cook like myself who defaults to recipes and precision. This is based on Soba's pastina e ceci from a couple days ago. I pressure-cooked the chickpeas, used orzo in place of pastina, and salt pork in place of pancetta. I used all the remaining ingredients mentioned - onion, carrot, celery, celery leaves, chickpeas, Italian parsley, sage, rosemary, sea salt, black pepper - including water instead of stock, which took some restraint because I had just made a large quantity of pressure-cooked chicken stock. However I was mindful of the thread from earlier this year about the superiority of water to stock in many soups, and also had recently reread John Thorne's rant on the subject in Outlaw Cook, so was determined to stay the course. I'm glad I did - this is a wonderful, herbal fresh & rich soup, bursting with the flavor of chickpeas and parsley. Thanks Soba.

I use an unglazed Rifi tagine from tagines.com and it has been a revelation for braises (and much else). As noted above, the porousness, the seasoning and the material and shape may all contribute to this. I've certainly put it in the oven to finish dishes, but I don't risk it under the broiler - I simply transfer the contents to a pyrex baking pan when a recipe calls for a finishing glaze. I don't see this as a huge disadvantage - not a ton of dishes require this step.

You're in the pre-theatre range for time and area so make your reservation soon. weinoo's suggestions are good ones. Sushi Zen is around there too.

Gorgeous pizza Peter.

Jealous - I don't know a source for these in NYC. Does anyone? And - Squeeze by hand over a sieve - seed problem solved.

For old school SF, similar to Tadich's but more low-key (and closes early, beware), I recommend Sam's Grill downtown. Great crab louie, grilled sand dabs and other Bay Area seafood specialties. Killer martinis too. There are Depression-era booths with closeable doors.

I used Lebanese pine nuts in that recipe... $34.99 a pound, but I only bought $3 worth which was plenty for the garnish. And I made preserved lemons with supermarket Meyers last winter, and they came out great. Maybe I lucked out. Or maybe washing them well was sufficient.

I made the tagine of glazed chicken with apricots last weekend and it was wonderful, just leave yourself more time than you think you need, pictures in the Dinner thread:

Hilarious article. I don't think I could participate in this though. Health-related scariness plus I'd have trouble letting my food go.

Took a day off from Chinese to try something from The Food Of Morocco, which I got for Christmas. It's funny, I recently made a Parsi chicken with apricot dish. This one was even better. Though, as usual with Wolfert recipes, it turned out to be far more involved and time-consuming that a quick skim would suggest. Nonetheless incredible - one of my favorite new dishes. While the marinated chicken cooks with onions in the tagine, you simmer butter, sugar, cinnamon and the apricots down to a syrupy glaze: This then goes in the tagine along with some fresh herbs and they cook until the meat is falling off the bone: The final step is a quick glaze under the broiler, followed by a scattering of pine nuts.

Personally, I prefer food to be served at the temperature it is supposed to be served at. That is, hot food should be served hot on warmed plates; cold food should be served cold on cold plates; and room temperature food should be room temp - I enjoy many foods at room temperature, which is where the most flavor comes out in things like charcuterie, etc. ^^^^ This

Yes that pastrami is the most gorgeous thing so far this year!

Thanks rotuts - I combined a Jewish chicken barley soup recipe from the web with an old Gourmet recipe for a browned chicken soup with leeks (and apples, Calvados and heavy cream - the latter ingredients, obviously, omitted from this). Although the stock was great, the soup was not successful - neither one nor the other. So we made a whole pot of the stock again the next day and some of it went into that chicken with Sichuan peppercorns further up, which was a wild success... the first time I've ever come close to wok hay. I recieved Grace Young for Christmas and now I want to use some of the insights from this book on the Fucshia Dunlop recipes I've been working on.

I'm planning some meatball dishes... Lion's Head meatballs (Chinese pork and water chestnut meatballs), and the Porcupine Meatballs with rice sticking out of them that someone posted recently. Will report back.

Mm, nice looking paella mm.

The Dunlop is good (I have the UK version), but not the comprehensive multi-region Chinese cookbook I was hoping for from her... more of an introductory cookbook than her other two, and repeating some of the dishes from those books. It's not dumbed-down per se, but it's definitely for beginners. Which makes it fine for me, I just wish someone would do a truly encyclopedic book of Chinese cooking a la David Thompson on Thailand, and she'd be great at it. It's a beautiful book by the way and just browsing it will make you want to cook many of the dishes. And yes, there are a lot of vegetable recipes.

Natural waterstones?