huiray

It depends on where your chicken and innards came from AND how it was processed and handled. In the USA, large-scale commercially-produced chickens and chicken offal do NOT have a good sanitary record - so the pasteurization approach may be the better one if you get such stuff, speaking in general terms - unless you have good tolerance for slightly iffy stuff. If you get your chicken and/or chicken spare parts from known providers with known practices - or from other places such as certain parts of Kyushu in Japan - that may be a different story. Or if you raise your own chickens and process them according to the known ways of doing so using best practices. There is no such thing as a chicken or chicken-parts that is universally the same in hygiene and characteristics (taste/contamination/whatnot) all over the world. Perhaps that may be an issue that you might reconsider. Here's a picture of a plate of RAW chicken & RAW chicken gizzards and RAW chicken liver, offered for eating AS IS in Japan. ETA: Also, even if you get a pristine batch of utterly properly-raised-and-processed chicken/whatever and then park it (uncovered) for a while next to a piece of decomposing meat that you mean to toss but haven't got round to it yet - that might also change the worthiness of the chicken to be eaten raw...

Well, folks eat torisashi and toriwasa (at least in Japan) and don't drop dead by the multitude...

Skinny wonton noodles [New Yung Ky Noodles, Inc.] dressed w/ a sauce made from oil, chopped garlic, some mui choy [Man Chong Loong], splashes of sang chau [Kimlan], oyster sauce [LKK] and ryori-shu [Morita], and chopped scallions. Eaten w/ sliced re-warmed/recrisped Chinese roast pork [from Asia Mart].

Itek Tim. Water, a duck leg & thigh chopped up (all skin & fat left on), sliced & lightly crushed galangal, crushed garlic cloves, trimmed & soaked/rinsed harm choy/syun choy (wet pickled mustard) [Dragonfly], sour & sweet pickled plums (酸甜梅) [Dragon] w/ some of the jelly as well, sea salt, tamarind pulp [Dragonfly] pre-slurried w/ a little water. A shot of scotch whiskey (I didn’t have brandy on hand and I had a glass of J&B’s in my hand) Simmer till done. All ingredients were commercial. Adapted from recipe P26 of “Irene’s Peranakan Recipes” (Epigram).

That is "affectionate"? Wow. The "poking, poking poking" characterization of Katsuji also came from Doug, when he commented about Katsuji purposely needling people (not just Aaron) to provoke them.

I suppose then that you consider Doug Adams to be a bottom feeder? If so I would strongly disagree. Katsuji is simply not funny to me. The best that can be said for him, from my point of view, is that he is like a frat boy joker. In my books, that is not a compliment. As I said above, a lot of what he says and how he behaves I find obnoxious and/or malicious. His "talking a lot" is also precisely one of the problems, let alone the sometimes-malicious nature of his verbal diarrhea. His "poking, poking, poking" at other people is NOT funny. Just.shut.up. That would help a lot. What also comes to mind is the standard response of bullies when challenged - "What, can't you take a joke?" - that somehow evokes what Katsuji reminds me of. That some cheftestants think him hilarious is telling, to me, in how they think of themselves as well.

OK, Aaron is gone. Too bad, IMO. I regret that Keriann was on the winning team. Her dish was pretty bad and blasted by the judges that mattered. If she had been on the losing team it might have been her that was sent packing. Now THAT would have been sweet. Katsuji is downright obnoxious in my books. Gregory says he is 95% hilarious. Sorry, I don't find anything he spews out in his verbal diarrhea to be the least bit funny. Rather, much of it is both obnoxious and malicious. I think both Aaron and Doug pegged him correctly.

An experimental dish. I think I'll adjust the components a bit if I make a similar thing next time.

Aw, you changed your avatar back to the old one. I also vote for a simpler back cover. Are you intending for the front-and-back designs to be on the dust jacket (if you are having one, over plain actual hard covers) or as the actual covers themselves? (i.e. no dust jacket)

Lunch at Mississippi Belle today. Fried chicken, collard greens (I had seconds, w/ extra pot likker), green beans, cabbage, mac n cheese, hot water corn bread (I had seconds of these, too) w/ fixings. Oh, and half-n-half (half sweet tea + half unsweetened tea)

Aw shucks, thanks, caroled.

c oliver, one of the brands of commercially-available pasta I like is Garofalo. The make their pasta using bronze dyes and their stuff have that textured rough surface expected from using such dies. I likee.

I suppose you couldn't find any commercially-available bigoli in your shopping area? I assume you made the thick spaghetti yourself as a stand-by for the bigoli. I would love to see your pasta-making setup and what you did to make the thick spaghetti - I'd like to make my own pasta one day (perhaps!).

Yong Tau Foo. "Fish Emulsion" [Venus brand], mixed with and stirred/beaten with chopped scallions (lots), sesame oil (both black & normal [Kimlan]), generous fresh ground white pepper [Caravelle peppercorns], a bit of fish sauce [Red Boat]. This was rested then used to stuff/fill suitably trimmed soft tofu blocks [House Foods], poblano pepper, hot red/green chillies, sweet Italian pepper, and smallish Chinese mushrooms/far koo [五谷丰 brand] (this one; I like these) stems snapped off and pre-softened. The chillies and peppers came from the Farmers' Market. Pic of stuffed stuff before poaching in chicken stock. Eaten w/ Lingham's Hot Sauce.

• Spaghetti Carbonara. Spaghetti [Garofalo], guanciale [smoking Goose via Goose the Market](cooked in a Cuisinart frying pan), Pecorino Romano [Locatelli], 2 egg yolks + 1 whole egg [Farmers Hen House, Kalona, IA], some of the pasta water (Cuisinart pot, gas stove)(sea salt [baleine]), parsley (from my deck, grown by me). Plate made by Wm. Guérin, Limoges. ETA: Oh, ground black pepper [Caravelle Special Grade], of course. (Banton by Vic Firth pepper mill)

Thanks. Well, those were my circumstances when I was growing up, that's all. As for canned foodstuff - I wouldn't say that they are necessarily bad - in fact I don't think that at all, at least not nowadays. Perhaps back in the 50's and 60's they were not done well but nowadays the technology has improved and the choices so great, especially of stuff hard to find or highly perishable that I myself use canned stuff of all sorts now. I also don't think of a lot of it (not all) as "poor substitutes" - but treat them as new ingredients. My father cooked on a few occasions. Yes, this was during the 50's and 60's. And when we ate out, as far as I know the great majority of the food we ate was cooked by men. In many cases - such as in non-hotel or non-fancy places the chefs would be in full view of the clientele. :-)

Anna N, oh, no no - the straw mushrooms are canned the meatballs are Venus brand. I have just put them in above. If they were fresh I would have commented on it as it would have been uncommon around these parts as you say. Neither did I grow the celery or negi myself or make these meatballs. I also don't make my own noodles or pasta.

Oil, garlic, chicken stock, straw mushrooms [Golden Summit], pork meatballs [Venus], celery, sea salt, Tokyo negi, celery leaves. Soba noodles.

Nick Elmi and Laurel (his restaurant) are doing well. http://www.phillymag.com/foobooz/2014/09/17/twelve-philadelphia-restaurants-make-opentable-best-restaurants-list/#more-2843454 http://www.opentable.com/laurel Laurel was also a JBF semi-finalist earlier this year; perhaps a higher honor awaits next year.

• Lap cheong steamed with the rice while cooking; "bowled" & eaten with the rice. • Steamed beaten eggs with chopped scallions. Seasoned (before steaming) with a dash of light soy sauce, some jozo mirin & diluted w/ water plus some oil. • Kai-lan stems & Western celery, stir-fried w/ garlic.

I've been reading other bulletin boards and forums dishing about Top Chef and one thing that posters there pointed out was that James WASN'T off-kilter when he made hummus/that bean paste as part of his QF offering. In Michigan, where he comes from and where he works, hummus IS a common bar food. Lots of people (including recappers of the episode) also pointed out that he fell prey to the old trap of stifling his own instincts in favor of "team spirit" when he acquiesced to the women on his team insisting on a seafood theme rather than sticking to his gut feeling of a meat dish instead. Of course, he didn't properly execute the dish he ended up with - but his heart was not in it anyway. BTW, here's the successor forum (the link is to the Top Chef section), kind-of, in a way, to an infamous now-dead forum.¶ ¶Not least because many of the members of that dead forum ended up in that other one. The dead forum was, of course, TWoP.

What I find interesting, actually, is that so many of you HAD miserable times at the family dinner table. I wonder if it had anything to do with it being NA food in a certain time in a certain milieu. :-) It would have been hard to have had a bad meal, whether at home or outside, in SE Asia where I grew up. Cost was also not a great factor - one could have any number of delicious foods for pennies (or at least cheaply) from any number of hawkers on the streets ("Street Food") from a great array of different cuisines; and cooking at home (at least in my experience) involved dishes and cuisines that always used fresh ingredients and tasty preparations. In fact, canned foodstuffs (from the West/Europe/rarely the Americas) were regarded as a "treat" - Corned Beef in a can, for instance, was a rare, rare thing to be opened only as a special treat (besides being pretty expensive). "Danish Ham" was an extravagant item, hoarded in the cupboard for that one special day. Chickens bought from the markets squawking and freshly killed were the norm. Fresh vegetables were the norm. Otherwise, dried vegetables and foodstuffs (like the sort I have described on the dinner and lunch threads and elsewhere, which are regarded as separate ingredients in their own right) were also the norm. Canned vegetables - as a "canned form of the fresh" - were a curiosity and were an "alien" foodstuff. Etc etc and so on and so forth. I had fresh rambutans, custard apples, sugar cane, bananas, nangka, chempedak, etc right from the garden of my family home when I was growing up. Various sorts of SE Asian beans, sour fruits (for cooking), etc etc also were there for the plucking. It seemed "normal" to me to eat all this stuff, without being "forced" to do so - largely because they were, for the most part, delicious - without my having to "develop" a palate for said things. The few times I mentioned being forced to sit at table involved things that were slightly "alien" or off-putting to me as a young child (like the liver and mushrooms I have mentioned) - and I may be remembering this wrongly (quite possible) but one of those occasions may have involved peas. Y'know, the type that appears on European/British/NAmerican plates unexceptionally. As I grew into teenagerhood I putt-putted around on a small motorbike and even brought back home to my mother (after school) stuff from shops I'd drop by - such as the char-siu or kai-see kon-lo mein I frequently favored. Throughout the years of my growing up we also dined out frequently. It could be done inexpensively or extravagantly, depending on the cuisine and the locale. Most of the time we did so in restaurants/eating places that were not too hard of a drain on my father's wallet. They ranged across the spectrum from Chinese (mostly Southern Chinese regionalities, true) to Malaysian-Chinese to Malay to Nyonya (Southern Nyonya/Northern Nyonya) to Thai & other SE Asian to Indian (Tamilian or Keralan or Mamak for the most part) to British Colonial (ever tried "Hainanese Pork Chops", folks?) to European of various stripes (Italian, English, French, etc; German was rare). We had dim-sum or lavish Chinese spreads in fabulous high-end restaurants (starting from when I was a little kid - I do remember) to down-to-earth grimy places where the dim-sum was no less fabulous in taste. And so on. "USAmerican" was a nebulous and not-much-thought-of food (if it was even a "thing") at the time. I can't say I ever had a meal that I positively hated. Maybe disliked (but can't remember which, if any), but my memories of these meals tend to fall into the "pleasant memories" category. Oh, it also turned out that I loved double-boiled (steamed) pig's brain soups from an early age... :-)

I'm a little hesitant to ask this, but I am genuinely curious - has anyone here had "choy kon tong" before, of the sort I posted just above or similar? (I expect folks like Liuzhou and Dejah and Prawncrackers have...) What about "harm choy tong"? (salted/pickled mustard soup) Or double-boiled soups? E/SE Asian soups do seem to be beyond the ken of many folks here (there are exceptions) so I am wondering about the experiences of folks here with such soups.

Choy Kon Tong. (菜乾湯) Pak Choy Kon (白菜乾; dried bok choy), stem bases broken off & leaves/stems trimmed/snapped into shorter lengths then soaked briefly in cool water. Soaking water reserved. Simmered in water (some of the soaking water added in) w/ beef short ribs, chicken neck & feet (for extra "body"), chicken drumsticks (added later), thick-cap flower-patterned Chinese mushrooms (far koo; stems snapped off, pre-soaked), dried cuttlefish, dried oysters, dried large Chinese jujubes, honey jujubes, sea salt. Low simmer for about 7-8 hours, topping off as needed w/ more of the reserved soaking water.

I've been in a Kimchi Mood lately. Today: Another bowl of the "Stirfried Kimchi Noodles" [Paldo] augmented this time w/ lots more baechu kimchi, a couple of eggs poached in situ, and lots of chopped scallions. Took a quick drive to Rene's Bakery and brought home a few things. Had a slice of their Bête Noire flourless chocolate cake/torte. :-)