fimbul

_Eat, Drink, Man, Woman_ is great, both for the food and the story (could be called _Fathers and Daughters_). A USAian knock-off called _Tortilla Soup_, about a Mexican_American fambly, is pretty, but all the substance leaked out during the translation.

The same director's _Amelie_ always makes me want... well, Amelie. But food too! A creme brulee, or roast chicken, both of which are featured nicely in the film.

O yes! And I owe it all to you! Seriously, I'd never heard of gomasio until a few days ago, when I ran across it in the sesame seed thread. I ran home, whomped up a batch, and it was love at first taste. I sprang it on my girlfriend for the first time at dinner last night, and watched her nearly jump with delight. Any more secret weapons you want to share?

Wilted spinach with gomasio. Sauteed skin-on chicken breast with fishsauce thinned with lemon juice and spiced with minced bird chiles (take THAT, bland bird boob! Ha!). Sliced shiitakes cooked in just a touch of mushroom stock with a sichuan peppercorn thrown in for funsies. Tiny eggplants sliced into rounds and sauteed in peanut oil spiked with minced garlic and more chiles. It was a fun dinner. edit: topyes

If the cheesemakers are, as we are told, blessed, are the makers of fake cheese damned?

I think this idea comes from the fact that the standard American yellow-stuff-in-a-can is fairly weak, but American beer is becoming a much more varied thing as more and more smaller breweries get into the act. Our ever increasing range of microbrews can be quite heady. The strength varies greatly from beer to beer, of course, but, at least in my neck of the woods, stronger beers are becoming nothing out of the ordinary. I think my idea of a session beer has finally crept into the 7-8% range, now that I can find Victory's Hop Devil in my local grocery stores, and my beer-drinking friends seem to be keeping pace with me as I stagger toward ever greater heights.

I've never used the Spyderco system, but as I understand it, it helps steady your knife as it grinds a new edge against a stone. Steeling isn't grinding a new edge so much as it is smoothing and realigning the edge you have. Others may be able to make this more plain. I'm not an expert, I've just been reading a lot of what the experts have to say on this subject.

O bugger. I started to reply to tell you that I steamed mussels with flavors very much like what you describe, but now I can't remember quite what I did. I *think* I steamed them in chicken stock, with ginger, chiles, lemongrass, and cilantro, but I feel like there might have been a touch of vermouth in there somewhere... I tell you, I can't remeber anything anymore. Have you thought about steaming them in gueuze? The belgians seem to love it. I've not tried it, but it's been on my mind so often I know it better than the recipe I have tried: iirc, it's just gueuze, a little chopped celery stalk and leaves, some shallot, and salt and pepper. Serve with glasses of more gueuze. Of course, a lot of people think gueuze tastes like a fat man's underwear. If you're one of them, this may not be for you.

I echo much of oraklet's advice, but suggest you look into buying Forschner's stamped filet or boning knives as well. They have a huge selection of shapes and sizes, and they cost far less than a forged knife. gourmetcutlery.com and knifemerchant.com seem to offer the biggest selections and the best prices. (For my part, I own two boning knives rather than filet knives: one 6" and stiff, and one 5" and bendy.) Ditto for the bread knife and the paring knife; I'd go with Forschner for both. Get the longest bread knife you can find (cutting 9" boules with an 8" knife sucks), and buy several cheap parers -- it's always good to have a couple at hand. Additionally, you might want to look into buying a carving knife, if you plan to slice roasts, carve chickens, or the like, but that can wait. Good luck!

My only beef with Trader Joe's is that they quit carrying the very nice frozen duck breasts they used to have. The clerk I spoke to claimed they did it to placate "PETA" (though I find no support that the scruples they listened to were anybody's but their own). Apparently, Trader Joe's wants to be assured that the duck they buy has been treated humanely and kindly. A laudable goal, perhaps, but, dammit, I want my duck.

Eggs bring this out in people. They're sort of storybook mystical in a _Wind in the Willows_ way. I think they're too closely associated with home and with family. There are all sorts of facts about eggs and egg cookery, but a lot of people cling to their way of cooking the things, and to the anecdotal explanations passed down with the methods. I think most folks want eggs the way their mom cooked them, with little regard for the experts and with little desire to try new variations. I find cooking eggs for others to be very difficult. It's often hard to overcome others' preconceptions about what a plate of scrambled eggs ought to be.

I was always told it makes the eggs smoother, creamier, and fluffier. The addition of cream, I must admit, does seem to make the taste and texture fuller and richer, but I've not noticed a lot of benefit from adding water. In class, by the way, I was told to add cream or milk to scrambled eggs but *not* to omelets. If I recall the reasoning was that you want your omelets more pancakey, and less fluffy. I've heard others dispute this, however, and I occasionally add cream myself.

I have great uncles named (or at least nicknamed) Yankee and Napoleon. My father grew up with a dog (dawg) named Dammit and a cat named Yellafella. My first name is Taylor. I was 4 before I first heard the "r" sound at the end. You simply cannot make this shit up. It's too good. ...That my father used to hide under my bed and make monster noises is an equally good story, but not, perhaps, peculiarly southern.

Are you suggesting, my good man, that devoting oneself to The Simpsons is not a perfectly cromulant use of one's time? Piffle.

I was recently informed, in all apparent seriousness, that what'll *rilly* make grits good is the addition of some white truffle oil. This during a conversation about Charleston/Lowcountry food, etc. I think I heard my grandmother absolutely spinning in her grave. The worst part is... I'm tempted to try it, just to see!

Last night, I found a couple of beautiful, bone-in, pork loin chops in my local supermarket. They were a dollar or two off so they'd sell before their sell-by date, so, of course, I had to buy them and save them from ruin. The Giant down the street always has several similarly marked packages of meat, and I always feel as though I have to "rescue" something whenever I'm in there. It's as though I'm saving puppies from the pound, and I actually feel a pang at the thought of all those I'm leaving behind. I took the chops home, seared them, bunged them in the oven, and plated them on a bed of mixed greens. I deglazed my pan with fine-chopped shallots and an old, open bottle of Liefman's frambozen (with a touch of vinegar added for zip), as well as a touch of chicken stock. Alongside, I served mushrooms and brunoised red pepper, and some green beans that were good, but not what I was after. It was one of those scenes were they turned out as I expected rather than as I had hoped. I cooked a couple of smooshed juniper berries and some coriander seeds slowly in olive oil, blanched my green beans, then removed the spices from the oil and sauteed my green beans. The green beans tasted of, well, green beans, and not at all of the spices I'd added. Ah well. I hadn't figured it would really work. I suspect that, to get a really spicey olive oil, I'd have to do more than simmer a few seeds for a short while.

Dinner the other night was an excuse to clean out our fridge before running off to a friend's party. I braised some beef cheeks I found at the local Giant in white wine with your basic mirepoix and garlic to add flavor. Kind of dull, kind of not my thing, but not bad. If I'd chosen a more interesting preparation, I might have liked it better, but I'd never had beef cheeks so I kept it simple to see what I'd found. Had garlicky wilted spinach and sauteed mushrooms on the side as well as some endives I cooked in a touch of bacon fat and finished with a small amount of mustard and evoo. There was also a salad and bread involved. Not an inspired dinner, but not bad for a what my partner calls "a whomp" (a dinner comprised of stuff quickly thrown together with stuff to produce stuff that you wouldn't mind ingesting).

Good lord... It cannot compete some of what has gone before, but in college I'd make fried rice with whatever friends with meal tickets could steal from the school cafeteria. I cooked fried rice with any number of odd processed sandwich meats and wilted vegetables (some of which I think had been smuggled out in peoples' pockets). One friend became peculiarly addicted to my fried rice with black olives and enough soy sauce to kill a moose. He still begs me to make it to this day, and recently lamented that my cooking had gotten too "fancypants" to recreate those glories of days gone by. I told him to eat his duck salad and shut up.

Did Hitchcock do a version of that? I thought the story was originally Roald Dahl's... "Lamb to the Slaughter"? Something like that. It wasn't until years after I first read that story that I began to wonder if the murderess had stuffed the leg of lamb in the oven still frozen. I think, from the timeline Dahl gave, she must have. And I suppose you'd need to serve lots of mint jelly to cover up any last traces of husband-noggin. I... I think too much about these things, don't I? *ahem* Yes. Yogurt cups. Love 'em. What was I saying?

Well, last night's plan was thinly sliced rare beef with a habanero aioli sort of thing. What it turned into was less-rare-than-I-wanted beef with a spread concocted from an oil way too bitter for the task at hand. It didn't stink, but it wasn't great. On the other hand, that disaster was served with quite good pan-grilled asparagus, and sauteed cremini mushrooms. Nothing's bad when there are mushrooms. Then I served a salad of spinach and arugula with a grapefruit vinaigrette that was just dull. All in all, it was a less than perfect dinner, but, hell, I was tired. I'd cooked a ton of food for an office party Saturday night which turned out damn well, so I was allowed a lapse.

I...I can't... You shouldn't.... Oy. Words.... Not enough.

And, for the love of gawd, don't slice habaneros, then go to the bathroom!

Lessee. I once: used nylon string to tie a roast. (Duh. It gets melty. Duh.) set dough in the oven with the light on to rise (still in bowl, covered in cling wrap), then, moments later, began to preheat the oven with the dough still inside. used three packages of chiles when I wanted a third of a package. I realized my mistake later, when I began coughing, crying, and crawling around my apartment opening windows. I made a mean pepper spray, but, as a curry, that was a failure. And, I once watched my girlfriend goof off by sucking a wine glass onto her face. As we giggled at the sheer silliness of this, the wine glass gave a soft, "Pop!" and died in a million pieces. Fortunately, no one was hurt. I must confess also at being a master at the old, grab-the-handle-of-the-pan-that-was-just-in-the-oven trick. The blood-curdling screams coming from my house last Halloween were not for show.

I had a pheasant and time to play, so I built a menu around that to surprise my SO when she came home from work. Started with a few sips of pheasant broth seasoned with salt and cayenne, and garnished with finely diced orange pepper and chives. Moved to confitted pheasant legs over mesclun (eked out with some fresh spinach) tossed with a tart grapefruit-garlic vinaigrette. Had a bottle of Orval beer alongside. Damn me if the Orval wasn't a great accompaniment. The confit was odd-seeming, at first, since I had adopted a recipe of Mark Bittman's for chicken confitted in olive oil, but it worked well enough. Main course was sauteed pheasant breast over wild mushroom ragout with endives. Made a small pan sauce of shallots, reduced orange juice, and pheasant stock. Served this with a Lucien Albrecht Riesling, which, uh... didn't work, quite. It was all I had in the house that looked like it'd even have come close, though. For dessert, I served sticks of parmesan with tiny glasses of Frangelico. This was all, I must add, by no means our normal fare. I now see, however, that it was the inevitable consequence of being left home alone with nothing to distract me but a fridge full of food. Isn't monomania marvelous?

If you don't mind veering just a little out of the District (perhaps by Metro), I know I've seen Smithfield hams in Virginia, and recently too. I'm not sure exactly where I was, but I wasn't too far off the beaten path, likely in a Whole Foods or a Harris Teeter, if not a more run-of-the-mill supermarket -- many stores in my area have passable hams. I know I saw Smithfield ham, though, because I was looking for some pre-cut slices of the stuff for myself. I was cooking a pork tenderloin stuffed with country ham and collards for my mother (served with creamy grits and some green beans) for her birthday, so I set out on a ham hunt. Of course, all this leads to an image of somebody lugging a ham from Virginia into DC on the Metro. I suppose it'll be good practice for later smuggling efforts though.