patrickamory

Tasting menus are over. Painfully long waits, painfully long dinners. The endless interruptions and explanations of exactly what is in each dish. At the end it's almost impossible to remember what you've eaten. I enjoy fine dining very much, but I wholeheartedly emphathize with Bittman on this one. After my last experience at The Modern I have no intention of going back, or going to any restaurant like it. Bring back traditional French service, and please remember that dining out is about more than the food. In the meantime, I'd prefer to eat at Acme or Pok Pok over Per Se any day.

If the roots are left au naturel, they can extend out a few inches, into graceful long sweeping tendrils... all usable except the some of the smallest ones, where the tiniest bit of scraping just pulverizes them.

Momofuku noodles with ginger and scallions, jazzed up with some pimentón de la vera and Tianjin preserved vegetables:

I think we need a definition of "casual."

Oh my God Shane those wings and shoulder chops look incredible. I gave Meenal's murgh cholay another try, but this time substituted young frozen peas for the chickpeas, added at the very end and cooked until just done. This dish is just tremendous, I urge you to try it! As mentioned previously, I use a mix of yogurt and sour cream for the curd specified in the recipe. (Also, Blether, if you're reading this, the Millser large container is perfect for blending the cooked onions and the curd.)

A deceptively simple sounding chicken and egg tagine from Paula Wolfert's clay pot cooking. It's not simple, but it's well worth it. The sauce becomes a custard that coats the chicken like velvet. And unlike many tagines, the chicken itself becomes broiled and crispy. It took me 4 hours rather than the 2 specified in the recipe, but was well worth it.

This sounds great. I'm gonna try it. Thanks!

Indian recipes (meat and non-meat) generally call for added water in my experience. Being a solvent is only bad when the dish is not meant to be diluted. (On the other hand Indian recipes that include meat generally want you to include the bones - if it calls for boneless meat, the dish may have been Westernized, and you may want to add stock for richness and texture in that instance.) Somewhere that I can't find, Richard Olney rails against the idea that a meat stock (or indeed a vegetable stock) is required to make a good soup. I can't find the place, but there is this passage from the introduction to Soups, page 264 of Simple French Food: "Plunge, for instance a handful or two of fresh and finely shredded spinach into salted, boiling water for 2 or 3 minutes and pour it over dried bread crusts that have been rubbed with garlic cloves and dribbled with olive oil; boil a lot of crushed garlic cloves with a leaf of sage and one of bay and strain the water over oil-oil soaked crusts; boil together practically any combination of vegetables, cut up, sliced or diced, add a piece of butter, and it will be delicious." Along similar Mediterranean lines, Patience Grey's Honey From A Weed always seems to assume water, not stock, is the basis of soups and stews.

Great info Kenneth and liuzhou. I've seen that black chicken. I've also had good luck showing characters to sales clerks on my phone. Will try both if needed. Thanks!!!

Murgh makhani... YUMMMM

Old chickens and roosters: Very interested in using these (I think there's another thread about them). Those of you who get them in Chinatown - how do you identify which are the old ones, "intended for the stockpot" as old cookbooks always say? MSG: Yea or nay? I've never used it, but I add "umami-ish" ingredients all the time to various dishes, so I wonder if I should go full white powder.

Interesting responses all. So much is determined by our lifestyles, household size and occupation. Working in the entertainment business I get home late (usually 7:30), I have to eat out several nights a week, I don't have children, and my partner travels constantly. So shopping for a week's meals is rarely an option. I try to keep staples in the fridge and pantry so that shopping for a meal is relatively straightforward. I also insist on cooking, as per a New Year's resolution a few years ago, as many nights as possible - for reasons of health, economy and quality, in addition to keeping myself out of trouble. I have staple dishes like everyone else, and try to save, refrigerate or freeze preparations that make my favorite dishes easy: homemade Thai curry pastes, real manteca, salt pork, rendered suet, Julia Child's dry spice marinade, frozen chicken lamb and pork stocks, various homemade Indian pastes and masalas, preserved lemons, etc. Good-quality anchovies, Danicoop san marzanos, fresh lemons, dried pasta, olive oil, cow ghee, and any whole spice known to man are always in the house. Fresh herbs on the terrace, though recently it's mainly been mint and hyssop due to laziness. We eat a lot of marinated pork chops, roast chicken per Marcella Hazan, spaghetti puttanesca, ground beef kheema with fried onions, fragrant chicken braised in yogurt and various other pastas with good tomatoes and some kind of sauce. We've just started venturing into Fucshia Dunlop's red-braised pork and dry-fried string beans, and I see a lot more Chinese in our future. But my favorite thing to do is a more involved recipe, and that is almost always a traditional regional recipe rather than something modern or composed. Recently I've made a lot of dishes in my unglazed tagine, which automatically demands much more time due to the slow heating required. We cook all kinds of Indian regional dishes all the time, and for a while we were doing lots and lots of Thai. We're always working on better chilis, usually purist Texas red based on beef and homemade chili powders and pastes from whole dried chiles, and recently dried legumes of all sorts have been part of many nights' dishes, courtesy of rancho gordo and other sources. If I have to start cooking at 7:30, my partner having started prep at 5:30 or 6, and we end up eating at 9 or 10, then that's fine. On weekends, we'll often end up shopping and cooking all afternoon. It's pretty much our lives, and the way that we bond together. When he's not here, I'm at loose ends - it's no fun cooking for one. We love to entertain, the more the better, and between our standbys and our new recipes (which frankly don't always work out), it's a constant journey, and one that's really enriched our recent years. For us, or at least for me specifically, it's not about putting food on the table - it's about the moment when you're over the stove and skillet and frying onions, a glass of dry sherry on the left, and intoxicating aromas rising from the stove. Almost better than sitting down to dinner. (I did make a baloney sandwich with Kraft singles this weekend, on an Arnold hamburger roll with mayo on one side, and it was one of the best things I ate in an entire weekend working on chole, borlotti beans and murgh chana masala... sometimes fast processed food is great too.)

In my mind it falls into the same class as black truffles, or perhaps huitlacoche. I'd definitely try it.

Wow, love those dishes! Is he restraining himself from adding any/all touches of southeast Asian cuisine (especially considering how inflected Vietnamese cooking is by French?)

going old-school: The Four Seasons would be the classic, they've had their own game estate upstate since the early '60s. Henry's End in Brooklyn Heights, an underrated restaurant, if it's still there, had excellent game and I believe specializes in it. [edit: I'd avoid Resto. I live in the neighborhood, and I find it unbearable and overrated.]

Slight detour - most of the Lahori sites go on and on about murgh chana masala, so I tried this recipe for that - however, using the leftover chana masala from the Soba/Smitten Kitchen prep. Pics in the Dinner thread. Obviously it departs from the original recipe because it adds prepared chana masala to a new masala, but I thought what the hell. And it was unbelievably delicious! While I was making this, I realized during the prep that I was making something very similar to one of my favorite Julie Sahni recipes, fragrant chicken braised in yogurt (dahi murghi). I might like this recipe even more, and it's actually easier as well. Just note that the "curd" in the ingredients list is the yogurt referred to in the preamble, and you're supposed to save the chopped chiles for the garnish. I really enjoyed the fresh chile, cilantro and julienned ginger garnish in this dish - you don't encounter that so much with curries. ANYWAY... I'd never recommend that anyone actually follow this method and make two entire separate curries and then combine them, it's way too much work. And ALSO, although delicious as hell, the final product resembled dahi murghi way more than the chole I get at the Pakistani cabdriver stands. So this might have been a diversion, though a most worthwhile & tasty one... highly recommended...

OK... the latest in my chole experiments... MURGH chana masala...

Wow, interesting, no ground pork in addition to the ground beef?

More details needed. Chat masala?

I can SMELL that meatloaf.

Yes, I realize the panch phoran was a diversion into Bengal I shouldn't have taken in my quest for Pakistani chole but it was too intriguing not to try. Next I may try tempering with North Indian whole spices instead - bay leaves, green cardamom pods, cinnamon, bay leaf and cloves. And I think omitting the garam masala is definitely a mistake, though it should probably go in at the end rather than being sauted with the other spices. I have just discovered this page, which seems like it might have some promising leads for a real Delhi chole: http://madteaparty.wordpress.com/2007/12/09/punjabi-chhole-chickpeas/ Whether this gives me the precise taste I'm seeking is another matter. I may want to try the MDH commercial masala powder that is frequently mentioned.

Ruth Rogers' pasta with cherry tomatoes in two vinegars. Tomatoes marinating: Finished pasta:

I was trying to recall what the British word for lungs was when you cook it... finally got it via Google... lights.

My latest try was SobaAddict70's adaptation of this one from Smitten Kitchen. Soba used a panch phoran and left out the paprika and garam masala, as did I. I also used ghee instead of oil, and doubled the quantity. Finally, I added some squirts of ketchup at the very end to up the umami. I use the baking soda trick. It definitely helps, and it also keeps the skins intact I think. My thinking about getting to the Punjab style via Delhi is along the lines of yours. There are a lot more recipes and websites the deal in Delhi and North Indian cooking than Lahori and Pakistani cooking, at least in English. And Jaffrey is from Delhi.

It's linked above... Soba's adaptation of a recipe from Smitten Kitchen.