Ruth

This may be slightly off topic. My Wolf range is 15 years old. I use it virtually every day. The electronic ignition on the burners is no longer functioning but I can live with that. However the oven, which was once a joy has now developed a mind of its own and is unreliable. Can anyone tell me if there is a way to calibrate it without a $250 service call?

If a goose is freshly killed it is even advisable to keep it refrigerated and loosely wrapped for a few days. I remember once buying one from a live-poultry market, cooked it three days later and wished I had waited another three days. If the butcher at Citarella tells you it will be fine until Xmas I would go a long with that and the goose will be all the better for it, especially a 12 lb. bird

After reading your book I contacted Raytek and bought one of their infrared thermometers. The one I bought will register only to 500° but I find it absolutely invaluable for quickly checking temperatures of my oven, freezer, oil and even stocks. Do you still use yours and if so what else do you find it useful for?

Are you sure it was actually corked and not merely over the hill? Did you keep it in a wine cellar? We opened a bottle of 1970 Ch. Lafite for the Millenium. It had been in our cellar for several years before we installed climate control but had spent its last fifteen years at 55°. A couple of years before we opened it the people from Lafite came to New York and we had it re-corked. Alas, when we opened it we found it long gone - no fruit, no complexity, just flat. It could have been a $10.00 bottle - a terrible disappointment.

Heartiest congratulations to Suvir and Henant. These were well deserved reviews. I hope you will be able to cope with the hordes.

Binh Duong's book is excellent. Although the recipes are largely his, the book was actually written by Marcia Kiesel, Food and Wine magazine's most talented writer. She traveled to Vietnam with Duong to research for the book. If you can still find it it will be well worth the trouble.

I love to cut a quince into wedges which I blanch for about 5 minutes and then sauté in butter. Cooked this way quince is a wonderful accompaniment to pork, squab or any game meat.

Do not despair. I frequently cook chicken breasts sous vide in the tilia bags. When I want to add wine or other liquids to the bag I freeze it in an ice cube tray before putting it in the bag and vacuum sealing. This works perfectly. For your purpose you could just let the marinade thaw in the bag before freezing the whole caboodle. I also have the top of the line Foodsaver for about four years now and don't know how I could exist without it. I wash the bags in the dishwasher, at the most once or twice as they soon become too small. I think marinating in the canister is a little quicker. Perhaps as the air is pulled out the liquid penetrates the meat. But I have never done a side by side test - with and without vacuum.

I plan to cook a whole lobe, tonight and at least once a week. We humans are omnivores. Let those who disagree eat cake!

Large sign on a stall in an old style Singapore food court - "Pig's spare parts"

We were at Gramercy Tavern last night after a long hiatus. It used to be one of our very favorites but we had not been since Tom Collichio stopped overseeing the kitchen. We were four and all chose different dishes. Not a single dish was above mediocre and the whole dinner was very disappointing. Old favorites, like the crab meat/ sea urchin ragout, had little of the flavor of their ingredients, meat was dry and unappetizing and the desserts were banal. Itis no longer worth the $68 prix fixe.

Squab is a favorite in my house. I bone out the breasts so that they will cook evenly and season both breasts and legs (just salt and pepper) a few hours before cooking. Sometimes I sauté and sometimes I grill, leaving the legs a little longer on the fire. To me it is very important that the breasts be rare as they develop an unpleasant livery taste if they are cooked through. I serve them with a wine/demi-glace reduction, often flavored with sour cherries or red currants or sharpened with mustard and a little sherry vinegar.

I use the Carola whenever I find them at Union Square and recently Paffenroth has had Bintje (one of Joel Robuchon's favorites), equally delicious. I certainly agree that the little Peruvian blues are delicious roasted and the farmers' market russets are so infinitely superior to the commercial variety. The downside - I'm tempted to cook potatoes in one style or another every day. Dr. Atkins must be turning over in his grave

Don't do it! The plastic on that thing cracks all over if you heat it to anything above luke warm! I returned one and the same thing happened with the replacement.

I must confess that I have always found kohlrabi to be pretty bland and tasteless. Is there any way to give it some zip?

Whatever "they" might say we had a wonderful meal at Amma last night. I swear that never again will I say that all Indian restaurants are the same. My husband and I took the tasting menu and every dish was a surprise, a pleasure both to see and to eat. Combinations of flavors were highly complex and sophisticated with several of the dishes adapted from old family recipes. We particularly enjoyed the salmon and halibut and the giant shrimp from Sri Lanka, cooked tandoori style. Our tandoori lamb chop was rare, as requested, and matched beautifully with a young Ravenswood zinfandel. Our thanks to Suvir and Hemant who were so gracious and attentive and to sommelier Bikky,so knowledgeable and the antithesis of a condescending French sommelier:biggrin:

I think you might like Sam Choy's books: "With Sam Choy" and "Sam Choy's Cuisine Hawaii" are two that I have and enjoy using. Both were published a few years ago but I would think they are still available. Jean-Marie Josselin and Alan Wong have both written good cook books but if you don't like "fusion" cuisine you might not enjoy them. The very first Hawaiian cook book I saw was a collection of recipes entitled "The New Cuisine of Hawaii", published in 1994. (Villard Books, New York). I had never been to Hawaii, but that book excited me so much that I planned a gastronomic tour of the islands and within a month my husband and I were there visiting almost all the restaurants mentioned in the book.

I say "a pox on all their houses". I do not find the recipes in Bon Appetit or Gourmet of the slightest interest any more. I dropped Food and Wine and Bon Appetit a few years ago and keep going with Gourmet only for sentimental reasons (I have been a subscriber for 30 Years). Recent issues of Gourmet have contained more ads than food writing. To my mind the only interesting food magazines for the non-professional are Saveur and Cooks Illustrated. On a loftier level Art Culinaire and the Art of Eating both make wonderful reading and there are great recipes in Art Culinaire. One can also get a lot of ideas from Food Arts.

Even when reconstituted morels have a special texture as well as a wonderful flavor. It would be a crime to grind them up (can they be so cheap in Iowa that this would make make sense?). Definitely incorporate them into a sauce. Traditionally they would be used in a cream sauce, where they become the star,but a red wine - demi glace reduction would also be good. I would use dried shiitake or even better porcini to coat your meat. Reconstituted porcini do not have a particularly good texture but when powdered the dried porcini make a great coating for meat or fish.

Many of the methods that work - sherry, rice wine, salt etc change the flavor of the ginger. A hand of ginger never stays very long in my kitchen as I use it frequently, not only for Asian cooking. When I buy a very large hand I break it into "fingers" and wrap each one very tightly in plastic wrap and store in the refrigerator. I have returned from a three week vacation and found ginger wrapped this way as fresh as when I bought it.

Goose is easy to find in New York in December. A few sources would be Ottomanelli in Bleeker Street and Citarella. Even Fairway would probably order one for you. To be honest I think duck has much more flavor.

I never cook a whole duck these days but a duck breast once a week or so is de rigeur in my kitchen I brine the breast for 24 hours and then let it dry in the refrigerator so that the skin will be really crisp when it is sautéed. I score the skin and then sauté very slowly skin side down, removing the fat as it melts, until most of the fat is gone and the skin is brown and crisp. I then flip it over just to sear the flesh, never cooking it beyond medium rare. I slice it on the bias and serve with a demiglace wine reduction with cherries or currants. I like to do this with Moulard or Muscovy ducks as the breasts of the Pekin variety are thinner. All duck legs are wonderful braised slowly or made into confit. I just don't get it. Duck has so much flavor. Again the problem might be overcooking, as with lamb. A whole duck cooked Chinese style can be wonderful but roasted in the old European style the breast becomes dry and tasteless. Many people have never tried it when properly cooked.

Most Americans overcook lamb. I think that many of the lamb haters might change their minds if they tried it cooked medium rare or, even better, rare. We eat a lot of lamb at home. I to prefer the leg. I have the butcher cut four or five steaks . Then at home I separate the rest of the muscles. They can be cooked in so many different ways - but never ever cooked through.

Lemon olive oil is great drizzled over grilled or sautéed fish or chicken breast. The O Olive company in California does it with Meyer lemons. I tasted it at the Fancy Food Fair - great but very expensive. I think they have a way of removing the juice as the flavor is pure Meyer lemon zest.

Thank you very much. I know that the California leaves are a different species but I just love their flavor and aroma.