huiray

...and why the Republican Party's claim that electing Herbert Hoover was like putting a chicken in every pot had such resonance then.

Old cucumber soup. Poona Kheera cucumbers, cured ham (Jinhua-type), dried Solomon's seal rhizome slices, dried Chinese mushrooms, Chinese jujubes (lam jou variety), the gelatin & sauce residues from the previous night's dinner.

• Marinated yellow-skin chicken pieces (from here; only ~2/3 were steamed for dinner) stir-fried w/ sliced young ginger (see here) & scallions. • White rice.

Then qualify your answer with what your circumstances are. Your post implied that olive oil cured all ills.

Change the "pairing of tastes" from Western (similar with similar) to Eastern (contrasting) or vice versa, depending on what the dish in question is.

Yes. With E Asian/Japanese/SE Asian types, in particular.

It really, REALLY depends on which cuisine. Even within European-type ones, "it depends". With E Asian ones, uh, NO.

I suppose Lansing would be outside the geographical area you are seeking to discuss? :-) I can't contribute to the list of restaurants for Asian food (West to East to North to South) in DTW as I have no experience in that area - but as I mentioned on another thread here on eG I have read about various restaurants in DTW on another food forum (cough) as I imagine you must have too?

A riff on an old-fashioned Cantonese dish, 金華玉樹雞.¶ This iteration was: Yellow chicken (breasts, wings, legs only; carcass reserved for stock some other time) cut-up into pieces, bone-in; marinated w/ generous Shaohsing wine, a little sesame oil, jozo mirin, a bit of light soy sauce, ground white pepper, lots of sliced medium-young ginger. Steamed w/ slices of cured ham§ plus some of the marinade in an enameled metal dish, then transferred to and arranged w/ trimmed kai-lan previously blanched in oiled boiling water. Steaming juices poured over. Eaten w/ white rice. ¶ Jyutping: gam1 waa4 juk6 syu6 gai1. (a.k.a. "Jinhua Yushu chicken"). § From Prime Foods, US-made; patterned after real Jinhua ham and labeled as such: "金華火腿"; but of course is not the "real thing". I thought of using shaved Jamon Serrano; I think I'll try that one next time. ...

I'm glad you think what you served might have, indeed, been tasty. So you were a great mom - how wonderful! and I congratulate you. There's nothing wrong with such retro dishes. They were the product of the circumstances of the times, of the situation one was in, etc. Perhaps one might not choose to serve it now but to conceal the fact that one DID serve it - short of felonious or criminal circumstances attendant upon the serving of same - seems unnecessary to me. Embrace it. (unless, again, criminal circumstances were involved) My two cents. As for youth and hair - eh, I think it is overrated. Muscular tone in one's youth - and persistence of hair on one's scalp - may have been a given but I don't fancy that over the maturity that comes with increasing age.** YMMV. ** Besides, I find more "mature" men & women to be more attractive, overall. There may be exceptions, of course. ;-)

Interesting! Thanks. NYT article from 2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/magazine/08food-t-000.html

Caroled, it's milder although it still is "ginger-y" and definitely tender. I used one head of these. The green stems/shoots are cut off and discarded and the rhizome gently rubbed under a running tap to remove just a few of the bracts. No peeling at all required or needed and definitely not recommended in my view. No fibrous nature to the slices of rhizome but they are slightly "crunchy", if that makes sense. Eaten like a slightly spicy tender vegetable. ETA: The "regular tan skinned type" you would get at a regular market are mature rhizomes, processed and slightly dried. Depending on where you got them from they could also be pretty old (stored for quite a while) and dried out. The young ginger I used here are immature rhizomes. The grower pulled these for me on Friday because I had kept asking for them, even though she said to me that she wanted her ginger crop to "get bigger" (and mature) this year. On occasion around this time of year in my local Chinese grocery I can also get ginger somewhere between the ones I used here and fully mature ones, far less pristine of course, because they would be a "commercial crop & shipment". Not often. (They are also more perishable because they are so "wet" and more delicate, by comparison with the mature counterparts) Of course, I would expect that in areas where ginger-growing is commonplace availability of young freshly-harvested ginger would be unexceptional.

• Sliced beef stir-fried w/ sliced young just-harvested ginger & scallions. • White rice. • Short-cut pork spareribs, garlic, snow fungus and wong nga pak soup.

I'm curious - why would you do that? Why disavow the years of wisdom that older age has endowed you with? Why subscribe to this fanciful notion of youthfulness that pervades so much of USAmerican culture? Why would one aspire to be young and callow?

I'm just curious - how old are you, ChefPip? Do you have customers who are older than you? Does the term "old fogeys" occur in the daily discussion?

Link. :-) p.s. If your menu changes daily or weekly or whenever, it still is VERY useful to show representative dishes of the sort you would serve and the price points of such dishes. Declare them SAMPLES. Hiding behind the facade of "oh, everything changes daily" is NOT an acceptable excuse for not displaying some sort of menu. ETA: And no, I REALLY do not want to do browser maneuvers and whatnot to "read" your fanciful webpage. K.I.S.S. is still a very good operating principle. I want to see the basic required information on a non-moving non-mutating front page when I go to your website. Anything else speaks to the fanciful bloated notions of the web developers preening and ruffling their feathers.

Yes. As I mentioned, various forms of "fondue" but called by different names (i.e. "fondue equivalents") are current menu items and have never gone out of style. At least not in parts of the world other than the USA. Many folks here refer to the CHEESE fondue version popular in the USA, I think, and don't really think about other forms of "cooking food in a dipping liquid" at the table which are present in various cuisines elsewhere. p.s. I would still like to know if bagna càuda is commonplace in Northern Italy nowadays...

Here's what I think (my personal opinion) is one of the most useless and pretentious websites. IMO it is even worse than what it was a couple of years ago, because even the gallery of "sketches" of some dishes (by the chef-proprietor) appear to have disappeared. There were people who defended it as reflective of the philosophy etc of the chef (and who had, of course, eaten there and communed with the chef) and who had written verbiose & gushing reviews of the place and food. That place is one of those "high-end" places referred to by another poster here (and, in fact, is regarded by some as the best "Frenchie" place in that nation) On this side of the world, the website for Le Bernardin is one that I don't mind, as one example, if we are talking "high-end" places, even if it does have flash content.

I don't have problems or issues with grating fresh ginger. I just use a box grater, usually after scraping off the skin. The juices definitely get collected and used too. I can imagine that if one does not get juices freely running when grating "fresh" ginger then the ginger really isn't "fresh" anymore. I've never frozen ginger, never needed to, don't see the need to. I use a lot of ginger. Really old ginger and/or very fibrous ones I might use for other purposes - like braises or slow-simmered (or double steamed) soups, but usually they just get tossed. For other uses (which is most of the time, really) the ginger gets julienned or simply sliced, usually with the skin left on but sometimes not, depending on what I am making or what I feel like. I've never needed to microplane slices of ginger, simply using my chef's knife is good enough. At other times I use my cleaver to crush (smack down hard) on knobs of ginger - better for releasing the juices - when using it for soups and poaches and stocks. Hard to do that with frozen ginger, I think. It's also so cheap (from my local Chinese grocery) and sufficiently fresh year-round that it seems...unwarranted...to freeze it. I just go get some more fresh stuff. Just speaking for myself. At other times (like now) when really young, really fresh ginger is coming out from the ground in the new harvest (like these) I would never think to freeze them - they get used as the vegetable delicacy they now are, fresh - not frozen. One rhizome I *do* prefer to freeze is galangal ("blue ginger") - because it is so woody and hard that cutting it or pounding it (mortar & pestle) is often difficult. Freezing it then thawing when needed (snapping off/cutting off a piece or chunk as needed) "macerates"/softens the tissue and slicing &etc is now much easier.

Soup. Oil, sliced garlic, sour shrimp paste (Tom Yum; gia vị nấu canh chua) [Golden Boy], quartered red shishito peppers, (mostly) whole small green shishito peppers, water, simmer; green zucchini batons, sliced standard white mushrooms, jozo mirin, dash of fish sauce [Red Boat], hon mirin; de-shelled de-veined large wild American shrimp. I had seconds and thirds and then was too full to cook something else. :-)

Asia Mart: Yellow-skin chicken, Jinhua ham (金華火腿), shrimp & pork wontons w/ XO sauce [Prime Food], abalone-chicken noodles [sau Tao], kkakdugi (cubed daikon kimchi), soft tofu, scallions, fresh skinny wonton noodles, kai-lan, corn oil.

Probably. ;-) Perhaps you might start a separate thread on that?

BRFM: Savoy cabbage, fennel bulb, baby "orange" carrots (new crop), small broccoli florets, teeny heads of white cauliflower (~3" diameter), old Poona Kheera cucumbers, bicolor corn, standard tomatoes, small long Japanese eggplants. CFM: Straight-from-the-ground young ginger (finally!!), green zucchini.

Naftal, GTA = Greater Toronto Area. Markham & Richmond Hill are areas with concentrations of good Cantonese restaurants. SGV = San Gabriel Valley. Said by many to be THE premier area for Chinese food of widely varying regionalities (and including Taiwanese) within the USA (note, NOT North America) For Cantonese food (which includes dim-sum) in North America, Vancouver & the GTA are said to be the best. The concept of going to "Chinatown" for anything good in terms of Chinese cuisine or supplies is gradually fading as the East Asian populations spread out and move into the larger population in many metropolitan areas nowadays. In some cases the "old" Chinatown even ceases to be the go-to place for excellence and new areas (more spread-out, even) take over. Yes, I've read about the exploits of folks in eating well in various Chinese restaurants in DTW and Ann Arbor on another (cough) food forum. I wondered about your experiences in an earlier post here.

Cai is listed as choice #1 in the TimeOut list I referenced in my post above. ;-) Glad you enjoyed it. Perhaps one day you might sample dim-sum in Vancouver/GTA/SGV/(even SF) and perhaps in Hong Kong. :-)