Busboy

I like the Stockhold Syndrome aspect of the show -- all the people booted off now leave with a big hug for GR and their former co-competitors, and a little speech about how much they learned and how much they respect everybody. And GR's even being nice, in return. Of course, American males who grew up in the great heyday of black and white war movies on TV recognize this as the plot of every boot camp movie ever made. Nonetheless, despite my best efforts, I've become hooked to the damn show, even if there doesn't seem to be enough screaming any more. Maybe we should have a party for the 2-hour Grand Finale. On a related note, is it me, or is the Bourdain thing not being broadcast in the DC area? (Maybe I can have my son find a bootleg on the 'net and we can pirate it.)

I'm glad you posted this. After my whining about Lexington, it occurred to me to start a thread on Valley/Blue Ridge/Highlands eating -- I'm not sure I can think of a region in the country that I find more beautiful and welcoming and, having scored a truly spectacular ham at a place called Laynes outside of Natural Bridge, I know that there is some good food to be had, when I'm not falling in love with the countryside or trying to cook dinner on a camp stove. (Tried to get my son to apply to Tech, but he swears he's going farther away from home than Blacksburg when he goes off to college. Dang.)

Funny you should ask. This site has a bit on the science of brining, complete with diagram. It's just below the piece on the Maillard Reaction, which is what happens when meat is browned. I have a deep distrust of scientific explanations for why food tastes good -- as with art, if it has to be explained before you enjoy, it's probably failing on a fundamental level. Nonetheless, I've got enough of the wonk in me to enjoy scooting through sites like this, and it seems to be well worth clicking through.

i can't say whtr bird is better since i've never had judy's or stephanie's; but to discount onebecause "brining is for sissies" is close-minded and ridiculous. maybe i'm being oversensitive; but cooks use a variety of techniques and tools in their repetoire, borrowing from the past and other cultures...being close-minded makes for a bad cook. ← My dislike for brining comes not from closed-mindedness but from open-mouthed-ness and having too many bits of pinkish white meat and rubbery breasts (sounds vaguely rude, no?) put into said open mouth. I pick on Palena only because, in this instance, it has become the apotheosis of a trend I loathe. I'm sure chef Ruta is undisturbed by my opion and, based in my last outing there, that man can foam on my bacon any time (another vaguely rude comment, it seems). Speaking of mouths, I've put my money where mine is, so to speak, with the cook-off and all are welcome to come 'round witness my (meaning Mrs. B's, of course) triumph -- or to cheer as I go down in flames at the hands of highly-trained professional chef and brine afficianado Malawry. Worst case scenario, at least half the chicken served is likely to be pretty damn good. And, don't forget the ice cream. Y'all come.

I'm spending a good chunk of the next few Sundays motoring into deep Southern Maryland and back along 301 (camp-time) and would be happy to accept any new tips, thread updates or timely suggestions regarding where to get some good Charles County 'cue. Hell, I'll even play delivery boy if anyone wants a Sunday picnic or spontaneous gathering. PM, in that case.

Them's fightin' words. I demand satisfaction. Oh, wait... ← Good Lord, I can't wait for this! Would either, or both, of you please let me know what wine you would like to see walking in the door? Barbara ← I can't speak for Mal, but on a hot August night I have a hankering for burly Southern French pink, maybe from Costieres de Nimes or a Cotes du Ventou, or a US Rhone-style rose, like Bonnie Doon Vin Gris du Cigar. But, I'm very flexible in these matters.

I've gotta say, with all respect for Chef Ruta and Palena's back room, which turns out extraordinary stuff, that I'd eat Stephanie's (if not Judy's) chicken over Frank's in a New York minute. Brining is for sissies. PS: If I'm paying $38 for a roast chicken I better be getting a shoulder massage as I dine and the sauce needs to be made with Mersault. "Cafe" my ass; at that price, using "cafe" in the name is just another marketing ploy.

No offense to Judy's cooking skills, but she does tend to run on when she writes. The four pages contains about half a page of "how to cook a chicken," the rest is bread salad and consensus-building. Basically, salt the chicken, put herbs under the skin, let it sit overnight and cook in high heat. It's not our "house" technique but I like it quite a bit and, as I said before, I think would be a good match against a brined bird since they both get the salt-infusion flavor. Bill, you going to bring the bread salad?

Reminds me of my 200 omelettes per shift days, way back when in London. No teflon pans either. ← I like the French steel (?) omlette pans because they're cheap, indestructable and perfectly sized and shaped. I cheat and use Pam, though. Even with the "new and improved" teflon, if you're a fork-stirrer, don't you risk getting shards of possibly carcinogen-esque and, worse, nasty-tasting non-stick chemicals in your eggs?

I'm thinking that a Zuni-style pullet will provide the closest comparison with a briner, as they both get that salt thing going. Then, maybe some herb butter under the skin. (Free range, of course, Signori Dente). Mal? On the trussing thing, we can handle the trussing or Mal can use the rack (what a choice -- trussing or the rack! "What happens at Busboy's stays at Busboy's, especially if jimmies are involved"). Trussing both means that they'll cook in the same time, though, which would be better.

The New York Times is no eGullet Culinary Institute, but they some good work every now and again. Case in point: this lengthy series on omelets. Pay attention to the sidebars: there are three articles and five videos in this series, all dedicated to the omelet. Personally, I'm more of a "fast cooker" than the gent in the videos but, as others have pointed out, the perfect omelet is in the eye of the beholder and the videos are well worth watching, particularly if you're at work with a high-speed connection and your boss has already left for the beach. For a more stimulating video on omelet production, line up a bottle of wine, get together with someone with whom you are doing the nasty, or hope soon to be doing the nasty with, and rent Tampopo. It's the scene with the homeless guys that live behind the restaurant, so stop making out and pay attention when you that scene comes on.

We usually skim the the pan juices and flesh them out with wine, chicken stock and whatever flavoring we use (lemon juice, garlic, herbs) then do the montee au buerre thing. Roast Chicken gets served with garlic fried potatoes or cous-cous. I don't know what trussing method we use but it seems to yield a superior product to either spatchcocked or unmolested birds.

Though every omlette begins, by definition, with a few broken eggs, there are many paths to glory once that act has been undertaken. I once had a Jacques Pepin cookbook (since swiped) with at least three different techniques demonstrated, none of which remotely resembles the "perfect omlette" linked above. I, personally, do the think where you move the pan back and forth in one direction while whipping the eggs with a fork swirling perpendicularly to the motion of the eggs and it often, though not inevitably, gives up excruciatingly good eggs. One thing that worked for me was making sure that the eggs are at room temperature before scrambling, as it tends to make the inside of the omlette firm up faster and hold together better, and might have helped in the crisis detailed by silverbrow. Omlette Trivia #1 (Likely True) Legendary Chef Andre Soltner, of Lutece, used to make potential line cooks demonstrate their kitchen skills by cooking him a simple omlette, because performing a simultaneously simple and extraordinarily demanding task would show the cooks grasp of fundamentals. One assumes they didn't use the teflon-and-rubber-spatula technique now popular at brunches across America. Omlette Trivia #2 (Undoubtedly false) The omlette gets its name from a French king who was so impressed by his first egg-and-cheese concoction that he cried out, referring to the cook: "quel homme l'est," "what a man he is," and the "homme l'est (silent 'h')" stuck as the name of the dish.

I'm afraid to ask...

Side dishes are requested. Beverages are required. Mal and I will coordinate, but people should think simple summer stuff -- bread, cheese, salads, chilled soups, things you can slice and so on.

Spatchcock? ← Yes, but grilled? broiled? fried? ← Teams of skilled negotiators are still working out the final recipes, but my leaning is towards roasted chicken which Stephanie, using skills acquired over many years, will firmly truss.

Whatever makes the food taste better, I always say.

This dinner had its genesis in this thread, in which, in my usual calm and reasoned fashion, I laid out my culinary and aesthetic objections to this over-used crutch. Despite the fact that Rochelle is a highly skilled paid chef with an impeccable culinary school background, I am looking forward to testing my skills -- or, rather, my wife's skills, as Mrs. B is the chicken chef chez nous -- against this incredibly talented kitchen professional, so confident am I in my -- Stephanie's -- technique. It's the least we can do to save the world from chicken that tastes as though it drowned at sea. But wait, there's more! Having calculated that ice cream made with organic eggs and farmer's market cream costs about 18 dollars an ounce, for dessert I am going to make two batches, one with market ingredients and one a "Safeway Special," for a second, dessert, taste test. Attendees are encouraged to bring their own syrups and jimmies.

Mexicans and Asians have a long history in California. More than 30 years. Wow it took us a long time to come such a short way in the eyes of the mainstream. This thread really shouldn't go further on a food only forum. (Ludja, I hope you know that I respect your point of view and have always enjoyed your posts. You've always stuck me as an intelligent, thoughtful and fair person. ) ← No harm taken and of course I don't disagree with anything you said--I'm tripping over my words trying to make the one small point that I stated first. Regarding my statement re: Asian and Mexican immigration to the US I only meant that overall in the US there has been a huge increase in immigration from those groups as a *whole* to the US in the last 30 years not that it hadn't existed before in certain parts of the country. I will stop trying to clarify though--this is going off topic as you mention above! ← (Immigration patterns and ethnic food in the U.S. rather than France might be an interesting topic in itself) Not to get too deep into demography here, but to the extent that immigration affects the spread of ethnic cooking but census data shows a more than tenfold increase in the number of Asian-Americans between 1960 and 1999, from 878K to 10.2 million, with their percentage of the U.S. population jumping 700%, to 3.7%. For Hispanics, the population jumped from 6.9M to 31M, and percentage of population from 3.9% to 11.5%.

What is wrong with our Vietnamese and Laotian restaurants, the best outside of Southeast Asia, and our North African restaurants? Not to mention Lebanese food? Do they count for nothing? What other ethnic restaurants should we have in order to be labeled "acceptable" in the field of non-French restaurants? ← It's not a question of "acceptible." But, I think it would be hard to make a case that France -- or almost any country, for that matter -- offers the variety and, often, the quality of ethnic restaurants that even fairly provincial U.S. cities (like my own DC) offer. And, as an aside, I'm sure you've better North African cooking, but I'd be curious to match DC's best Vietnamese, which is one of our strengths, against France's.

Anybody located between North Carolina and the Union Square Greenmarket should ruch our and pick up Patrick O'Connell's (of the Inn at Little Washington) Refined American Cusinine, which is pitched perfectly for this region and season. Corn, country ham, crabs and shellfish, fresh peaches -- it's like he's going to the same markets you are.

Doesn't having the peaches shipped kind of defeat the purpose? Mustn't they be picked "early" in order to withstand the rigors and time-delay involved in shipping?

Stop making sense!

I respectfully disagree. Firstly, Paris is not a good representative of any French regional food; rather, it is the giant melting pot of all of the French cuisines. French regional cooking is very very different from area to area. The "Nicoise" cuisine is pretty unique, you really don't see it anywhere else. From the namesake Salade Nicoise, to things like Pan Bagnat, Pissaladiere, and Socca, these are foods you would NEVER see in Italy. As I said in my above post, the ingredients may be similar, but the food you will eat in Liguria, just 30 miles from Nice and the food in Nice is prepared and served very differently. Soupe de Pistou has basil, but it comes in a reddish color, rather than the bright-green pesto preparations across the border. Yes, Nice east to the border was ruled by the Savoys until 1860, when Napoleon III cleverly "swapped" it in return for support of Italian unification. But probably the architecture (especially in Menton) would serve as a better reminder of the Italian roots rather than the food. ← Didn't mean to imply that Cuisine Nicoise wasn't unique, merely to suggest that it may have more in common with Italian cooking (without being Italian) than with, say, to the cooking of Normandy or Burgundy. Hell, the first meal I ever ate in Nice featured was pasta with pesto and oxtail with polenta (at La Merenda, whose existance you may have alerted me to on a much earlier thread). That's more than vaguely Italian. And I couldn't help but notice the profusion of pizza joints in the city, one of which served me an excellent pie.

What makes you think this prevalence is exclusively Italian in nature? ← It may be less obvious to the French, but any American going to note significant overlap between Nicoise/Provencal cooking and the cooking of Italy. Not surprising, given that Nice was more or less part part of Italy and various Italian kingdoms until 1860. It seems rather unfair to annex part of another country and then claim that country's cooking as your own. The U.S. annexed a big chunk of Mexico, but at least we still call the food Mexican or Tex-Mex, giving credit where credit is due. It's fruitless to argue who first put tomatoes, garlic and basil together or harvested the first artichoke but -- like the Nicoise writing on the buldings in the Vielle Ville -- I found the food of that region is a lot closer to the Italian border than it is to Paris. Interesting website on Cuisine Nissard here.