patrickamory

Puttanesca has recently become my "pantry dish" - a meal I can almost always make from whatever's in the house. Then I thought - what if I were entertaining vegans? It's never happened. But I was thinking... I could substitute Marmite for the anchovies. Insane? or... SANE?

Mmmm those anchovies look delicious.

Buvette: be warned that most tables do not have real chairs, but backless stools. It gets uncomfortable for most of us after a while. Also the waitress forgot our cocktail order and then served the wrong main. The lentils were excellent, and some of the other dishes very good, but I won't be returning. More due to the uncomfortable seating than the service issues, which can happy anywhere. Red Farm: I was very unimpressed with this place, and I like Americanized dim sum as much as anybody. The selections and flavors weren't that interesting - or rather they looked a lot better than they sounded. We ordered three different kinds of dumplings, pork belly, the dried scallop and Chinese sausage fried rice, a roast duck dish and something else. Also didn't enjoy sitting at the long end of a crowded common table. YMMV.

Some more thoughts: Prune Ushiwakamaru Frankie's Spuntino - the original in Carroll Gardens Ciano Peter Luger Kang Suh Omen

Craft I stopped going to a few years back... the formula felt stale and the food not as great. Maybe it's experienced a renaissance. Never been to the Lincoln, and only to the Brooklyn branch of Fatty Cue. It was fun and boisterous, and the drink and food delicious, though I think the various meats we ordered were probably too similar to one another. I used to really love Fatty Crab, and have heard great things about the Manhattan Fatty Cue, so I will definitely give it another chance. Unfortunately very few of the great Williamsburg restaurants take reservations. It's a not-great part of that scene.

Ate at Il Buco this Tuesday, it was fantastic as it generally always is. I'd book as soon as you can if you want to land a table. I think they accept 30 days in advance. If you do one Momofuku, I'd recommend Ssäm Bar. Don't ignore Williamsburg. Some of the best restaurants in the city are there now. Diner is one of my favorites.

Soba - the penne arrabiata - another fantastic photo. The colors just pop and you can almost feel the texture of the pasta, which looks just perfectly done (to my taste - slighty al dente). Also it reveals excellent tossing technique.

Right all of these have been from above. I get it! Will try some of those. Thanks again people

Couldn't agree more on David Thompson's method. It's particularly important for Thai food with its intensely loud flavors - they have to be perfectly in balance, and the final adjustment is crucial. As per his recommendation, I only add about half of the fish sauce and then adjust toward the end - as well as the other flavoring ingredients. Thanks for the recommendations guys - I was hoping for some more specific comments, since I generally cook on these principles. I don't think the Batra book is basically flawed because reviewers, here and elsewhere, have had no problem with her recipes - but her strategy of making large quantities of certain key ingredients clearly doesn't scale.

Also, "life is too short to do it the right way." Eat it!

OK, here's another attempt. Kala chana from the Neelam Batra book. Better? There's some rather obvious clone-stampage and smudging going on at lower-left to remove some spots I should have wiped out of the original bowl

I haven't had much luck scaling Neelam Batra's large recipes down for 1 or 2 people - see a post I made in the Dinner thread. Both Prawncrackers and especially djyee100 pointed out that recipes don't always scale well up or down. And in particular, that spices, salts, any fat or oils, and sour ingredients don't scale well. This actually correlates with my experience. I'm used to scaling, because it's just me and my partner here, and he's often away, so I'm often cooking for 1 or 2. In practice I often cook for 3 or 4 and have leftovers. In any event, I'm always scaling recipes from various sources - Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey, David Thompson (his recipes are actually usually for such small quantities that they often suit us right out of the book), Julie Sahni, the New York Times or wherever. And I've gotten quite used to keeping spice quantities more or less the same, or, say, taking them down by a third when the recipe is for a half... and of course, tasting and using my sense of smell constantly. But Batra's recipes have been tough. Part of it, as Prawncrackers points out, is her attempt to make life easier on her readers by making vast quantities of pastes, masalas and so on in advance, so the scaling is more extreme. I'm not into having 1-1/2 cups of garlic and ginger paste in the fridge, or rasam powder in the cupboard, if I can avoid it - there's no way I'll use that much before it goes bad. So anyway - not about Batra specifically, but in general, I was wondering whether anyone had rules of thumb on scaling for savory cooking beyond our five senses (and obviously I'm not talking about modernist cuisine). Here are mine: - same amount of oil, or close to it - same amount of spices, or 2/3 in proportion to 1/2 recipe, adjusted to taste - salt: constantly adjusted for taste It's interesting that djyee100 brought up sour flavors. I hadn't realized that they didn't scale well, which may be one reason why when I make dishes containing tamarind, they never seem sour enough. That, or I need to bite the bullet and make proper tamarind paste out of dried pods rather than using the Thai paste blocks Any thoughts on scaling from anyone else?

Thanks ChefCrash. Really useful. Yes, looking at the selection in the second pic it's clearly botched in a few places I do try this, but it's not always so appetizing, especially with stews, curries and so on - there's just a big mound of food and you don't get a sense of the scale. At least in my experience so far. P.S. ChefCrash: we're all waiting with baited breath for the next phase of the kishk experiment!

Well, the Good Mother Stollards were just phenomenal. I just ordered 3 more pounds of them. Also got runner canellinis, Jacob's Cattle, the midnight blacks, the oregano Indio... and the dried white corn. Since the white corn has been slaked, I wonder if I can grind it in my wet grinder to make masa?

Wow, incredibly useful advice guys, thanks. dcarch your editing abilities on jpegs posted here are nothing short of astounding. Keep 'em coming folks!

I can definitely use some advice from your eGullet shutterbugs. I've been following this thread closely, reading up on food photography on the web, and Prawncrackers gave me some good tips in the Dinner thread. I have Leica P&S - the D-Lux 4, which is really a more expensive Panasonic Lumix from a couple years ago. I shoot in RAW, in Aperture priority, usually f2.0-3.5, +2 sharpness, +2 contrast, +2 saturation, noise reduction -1. I aim to shoot in 100-200 ISO and to keep the shutter speed at 1/60, keep the camera as steady as possible (I don't have a tripod). I shoot in 4:3 mode for food. It's almost always dark out when I take food pictures, and the best source of light is directly underneath an under-cabinet halogen lamp above my dish-drying rack. I set the white balance on the camera to AWB or to Halogen, and then correct in Photoshop. Below is first the picture of last night's pasta puttanesca that I posted on the Dinner thread, and then a version from this morning. Both of them I post-processed in Photoshop - mainly by using Gaussian blur on the dishrack in the background. The second one has been cropped more tightly and has a bit more saturation added in Photoshop, and is sized to 516 px width in 72 dpi, which seems to be the eGullet default thread width (otherwise the board software does additional resizing, which might result in image degradation - I'm not sure). I didn't do a whole lot to the white balance or the colors in either one. I tried Color Balance in the second one, but none of the sliders seemed to have a huge effect on the overwhelmingly warm, yellow effect. Maybe I should have tried correcting WB first. Any and all criticisms gladly received, from equipment to presentation of the food to composition to post-processing. I want to learn. [edit: taking note on the comments about focal length above, I zoomed in a bit to take the photo. I don't know how close I got. The lens is 24-60mm 35 equivalent, but in reality 5-12mm, so I think shallow depth of focus is impossible, but maybe the photos look less distorted to you professionals if they're less wide-angle?

Puttanesca is my default dish when I just want to use ingredients I already have around the house. I use an adapted NYT recipe from a couple years ago. This was my most successful effort yet - I had thirds.

C. sapidus, what was the recipe for the Malaccan beef and vegetable stew? That looks DELICIOUS. SobaAddict70, thanks for the Arroz Caldo link - I'm definitely giving that a try! We have lots of high-quality saffron in the house that we need to use too.

Prawncrackers and djyee100, thanks for the advice. I realize that spices and oils are not always scalable in recipes, but sometimes it's difficult to figure out how to get it right. I usually do, especially in Indian cooking, but for some reason, I haven't had much luck with Batra. I made an eggplant dish last night that tasted nice - it involves roasting and charring the eggplant, then simmering it in a fried mixture of tomato, onion and salt - somehow it just didn't do it for me. It's possible that she's Americanizing her recipes too much and I'm instinctively trying to un-Americanize them By contrast, I made a quick pickle from the book that really did turn out well - minced ginger and chiles with ajwain seeds, lime juice and salt. It's quite bitter and really complemented the lamb dish further down: The rest of the meal came from Madhur Jaffrey and was a complete success. Steamed tilde rice with Kashmiri red chilli lamb: This is an unusual dish - no onions, garlic or fresh ginger. First, you simmer chunks of lamb shoulder for an hour with turmeric and salt, draining and reserving the broth. Meanwhile you make a paste of ground mild Kashmiri chiles for color (I used Hungarian paprika) plus hot chile powder, ground fennel seeds and ground dry ginger (sont) with water. Once the lamb is done you fry the paste with tamarind, cinnnamon stick and cardamom pods until it floats free of the oil (I used ghee), fry the lamb pieces in that, add the lamb broth and reduce. The result is absolutely exploding with lamb and cinnamon flavor. The ginger/chile pickle was a wonderful addition. In addition to the eggplant, I made a Kashmiri spinach dish, also from Jaffrey. It's hot and spicy and features mustard oil and asafoetida. The dusting on the top is garam masala added at the very end. Point: Jaffrey. But I'm still getting started with Batra.

Tonight I made tarkari rasam (spicy South Indian vegetable soup with tamarind) from my new copy of Neelam Batra's 1000 Indian Recipes. First I had to make rasam powder. The dry ingredients, ready for roasting: The roasting spices, with the dried curry leaves (I only had fresh, so I dried them myself in the oven): The resulting powder: And the final soup, which contains toor dal, a variety of vegetables, black mustard seeds, cumin, asafoetida, fresh curry leaves, cilantro, ginger and garlic, and tamarind paste: The dish was not a success. Somehow the soup had a gritty texture and the flavors were not quite balanced. It's possible that I didn't cook the dal down sufficiently - she says to cook until "very soft, 20 to 30 minutes," but it was more like 45 minutes for me, and I had to add lots of extra water. Or I might have miscalculated the proportions somwhere. The recipes in the book are all for vast quantities, at least if you're cooking for 1-2 people. For instance, had I made all the constituent ingredients in the quantities recommended, I would have ended up with 1 1/2 cups of rasam powder, 1 1/2 cups of tamararind paste and 1 1/2 cups of ginger-garlic paste -- the last of which I was only going to be using 1/2 tablespoon!. On top of this, I was cutting down the actual soup recipe by half. So it's possible I got something mixed up along the way. This would be my one complaint about the book, which otherwise seems packed with good ideas. Oh... also, she only calls for 1 tbs of oil for sauteeing the spices and vegetables- which would have meant 1/2 tbs for the amount I made. I used 1 tbs and it still seemed too little. I wonder whether she's attempting to be moderate for American fat consumption. Anyway, I'm convinced the rasam powder turned out correctly (I made 1/6 of the amount, which made for some crazy calculations like figuring out 1/6 of 2/3 cup of coriander seeds... I came up with 5 1/3 tsp coriander seeds), so hopefully I'll be able to put it to better use soon.

I use Marcella Hazan's method (cooking upside down with the rolled pierced lemons). Trussed front and back. Best roast chicken I've ever had - anywhere.

Life is too short to do it the WRONG way.... eat out instead.

Garlic, I guess.

rro, I think the photo of the paella came out great actually - looks delicious. Prawncrackers, thanks for that, so +2 on contrast, saturation and sharpness, right? Going to have a go with these settings on my camera for my upcoming Dinner shots, though my compact Leica won't allow me to bounce the flash unfortunately

OP still hasn't returned to thread... The following cookbook recommendations assume that she lives in the US. If she is dedicated, and likes traditional European food, then I will add my name to the list for The Way To Cook. It was my first serious cookbook, and between the photographs and the text, is an incredibly straightforward guide. If she's a natural experimenter, thrifty and interested in American home cooking and regional cuisines - and likes to read good prose - then I'd suggest starting with any book by John Thorne. Simple Cooking is an easy way in. Similarly straightforward and readable books are Laurie Colwin's Home Cooking and Miriam Ungerer's Good Cheap Food. If she likes Italian, then she can't go wrong with Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. Apologies to OliverB that it doesn't contain any photos, but it is extremely easy to follow and very reliable. But if she's starting from a position of ignorance, it's essential that she read the introductory chapters on ingredients and techniques. For (Delhi) Indian, Madhur Jaffrey's An Invitation To Indian Cooking or Julie Sahni's Classic Indian Cooking. If she's into Mexican, Chinese or Thai cooking, there are a wealth of cookbooks out there but with the exception of Fucshia Dunlop they may be for the more advanced cook. I'd agree with other posters that Bittman's How To Cook Everything might be a bit much to start with. The Joy of Cooking, at least for me, is more of a reference book than a guide - albeit one I consult frequently. edit: A possible more modern, multicultural possibility, with lots of photos, would be David Tanis, A Platter of Figs. Or for Italian food with a touch of England, The River Cafe Cookbook.