Busboy

This is the Larousse definition too. As a matter of interest, will you be leaving the stones in your cherries? This is one of the big French cullinary debates. ← What is the basis of the pro position in the debate...tradition, or is there some value to the pits? ← I think both. Many hold that the kernals add a mild almond taste to the flavour of the batter. And the cherries used should be black. However tradition runs very deep too. In fact the purists from the Limousin (the area of France from where the clafoutis hails) maintain that if the cook is not from the Limousin, then the yield of his labour is not a clafoutis! ← Much discussion on this issue by wise people -- including a couple of chefs, some actual French-type people and Paula Wolfert -- in this thread.

I just live on pizza and carryout for a couple of days. Maybe an omlette and some fresh fruit. A change is as good as a rest and in a day or two, I'll start to crave a decent home-cooked meal and I'll end up back in the kitchen again. You can't force inspiration, and uninspired cookies don't much seem worth the effort, to me. Better to use the time to tend the garden or to read a book.

Any eggs? Make a raspberry flan. Otherwise. Sautee the onions long and slow, adding a dollop of cream and a splash of vinegar at the end, and serve beneath grilled sausages and the quickly-sauteed bell peppers, and beside the spaghetti with tomatoes. The chicken is for tomorrow; roasting a chicken properly is too delicate an operation for a bad day. Sausage forgives. But first -- put the kids out of the room (TV was made for this, as guilty as you might feel), put whatever music you love best on the stereo at whatever volume you require (short of drawing the sherrif) make yourself no less than one and no more than two stiff drinks, and start chopping just because it's fun to play with knives. It always works for me, anyway. And, as a wise man once told me, everyone is doomed to have one fucked up vacation, birthday and anniversary in their life. Now you 've got yours out of the way, you can look forward to better onces to come. Good luck.

That's what keeps me going.

That's one of the things that bugs me about the area we were traveling. The North end of the Shenadoah Valley (and for all I know, the Souther portion, where we stayed, too) is the source of incredible produce, beef and cheese. Very seriously good stuff. But, apparently, far more of it it going to the city farmers markets where I buy it, than is heading south down the Interstate to the smaller towns along I-85 and U.S. 11. It's possible that I would eat better if I shopped at the farmers markets in DC and brought the stuff with me to the Valley to camp, than if I shopped in the counties where the stuff I buy is grown. Odd, that. But, if we didn't hit any great restaurant dining, we did find a roadside store that sold whole and half country hams and home-cured bacon, and we did find a couple of bottles of locally produced pink wine that went down damn well in the woods by the swimming hole -- and gave me the courage to almost keep up with my son, as we traversed from rock slide to rope swing to cliff. (If y'all need some [70's-era] soft-drink commercial-quality swimming holes, PM me). I'm with Holly, though, in almost always being ready to throw the dice one more time, rather than eat at the chains, and to get off the Interstate and go the backroads, whenever time permits (this is not always a popular strategy but, hell, I'm the Dad and the Driver). And, at one level, I'd rather have a meal bad enough to get a 2-page thread (always my goal) on eGullet than the chain-store meal.

i'm with Holly on this one. Plus, the desk clerk was clearly not a local, so I would have expected, at best, a list of whatever the "usual suspects" (or a steer to the Ruby Tuesdays next door, which has a relationship with the hotel). I remember once, years ago, asking all over Little Rock, Arkansas, for a decent barbecue joint and getting repeatedly steered to the chain restaurant in the redeveloped Watefront section. Finally, an old geezer bellman steered me a great place in a "bad" section of town where we had great ribs and sides and great service from the lady who owned the joined, who was clearly quite tickled to see a little bit of the tourist trade dropping in. (Speaking of Little Rock, on another night there I found a decent red-sauce Italian joint, too. One of the reasons we hunt down Italian places when we're in strange towns is they seem to be pretty high percentage shots for a decent plate of pasta, garlic bread and cheap wine. The error in Lexington was not going suffiently downscale Italian -- also, getting in late and too tired to scout around properly.)

We weren't exactly prepared for restored mansions -- we were pushing the edge of underdresssed at the place we hit, as we had packed for a campsite. And I put only so much faith in googled reviews -- the restaurant we went to last night is listed among the swell joints in town on the Lexington tourism website and reads a lot better than it eats. But, as I said, we would have been plenty happy with mere competence. Sadly, that wasn't on the menu last night, and find this kind of experience to be way too typical --unless you know the scene well, or have Holly's excellent radar, it's hard to get a decent meal. Oh well, on to the Pink Cadillac and the woods, where if dinner sucks, I'll have only myself to blame.

Damn! Drove right by it, looked it over and moved on. In my own defense, I will say that I've been to any number of places that claim to be what Redwood Family Restaurant apparently is -- tasty local cookin' -- and found myself choking down deep-fried, pre-portioned robo-cuisine. Also the kids wanted Italian (damn them!). The diner tip has crossed my computer just in time, though, as we are headed that direction this morning.

It was a place that aimed at "fine dining," more or less. We're perfectly happy to eat at bars and dives, but Lexington is a nice little college town (VMI, Wshington and Lee) with a little bit of old money and a pretty downtown, so we thought we might be able to have a nice dinner out with the kids. We weren't expecting Michelin star-level dining, but we were hoping to be pleasantly surprised. Alas... in retrospect, we should have just eaten at the Ruby Tuesdays next to the hotel. (Ewwwww. Strike that last sentance.)

If it was a local DC joint I'd savage it by name, but in a gesture of truce with Red State America I will leave it nameless. The phrase "authentic Tuscan cuisine," however, will henceforth evoke bitter memories.

(I wouldn't post this if tonight hadn't been so typical.) Good lord. I know that when you live in a rural area you learn the good restaurants from the bad and where to get barbecue and country cooking. But for us out-of-towners -- God help us. Rolled into Lexington, Virginia tonight and got a hotel room because we got out of town late and we didn't want to pitch the tent in the dark and the weatherman was calling for hail. Tomorrow: out to the swiming hole. Hit Main Street for dinner and fell into the black hole of backwoods dining -- earnest at every moment but comically bad at every level. Bad food, what little there was available; laughable service, the waitress didn't know how to pronounce "lentil" or, evidently, take a drink order; the wine was appalling and iced in a beer pitcher, and the place had all the ambiance of a Motel 6 lobby. And the local gentry were dining with us! We held our tongues -- though even the kids burst out laughing once we got back into the car -- and tipped well, but it was a way-too-typical example of how awful out-of-the-way U.S. restaurants with pretentions of sophistication can be. Let me say it again: Pretense of sophistication, meal so bad you just had to laugh. I've had some bad meals in the French backcountry, but it always at least felt like there were profesionals involved in the dining process. Too often -- one could say, always -- in rural America, any attempt at dinner above the diner level descends into parody. What's up with that? Why is it so hard to get a decent meal outside The Big Town? How can we come together to make this work?

I have a Cusinart and I think it works pretty well. And I got it for fifty bucks, with a second cannister thrown in, so I can make multiple 'screams at will. I think they turn out a pretty good product at a pretty good price. With the dual cannister Cuisinart, though, I've had trouble with the plastic lids (these things) that hold the paddles in place as the cannisters turn. The little plastic triangles that keep the paddles from spinning have been breaking off one-by-one meaning a $50 machine is rapidly approaching uselessness because of a small plastic part.

All my burners are different sizes, so my choice depends on flame demands and pot/pan arrangement. The right front is the Big Bertha, so it's the first choice for anything that needs beacoup BTUs or a wide, low flame. That's where the big iron skillet lives. The left front is the second-smallest of the four -- the smallest are the "warming" burners; right rear and smack-dab in the center -- it gets sauces and vegetable sautees. The left rear is the #2 in terms of power, but doesn't get used as much as the front burners. It's for boiling something while you're making a sauce up front.

I found this article in Slate emphatically annoying; there's a whole yuppie "you can't make good ice cream without a delicate technique and expensive equipment" attitude that I find self-aggrandizing. Nonetheless, it does have some good tips and reviews of a couple of machines. It was in this thread, comparing ice cream makers.

To avoid the icyness, macerate your fruit before adding it. It draws out a lot of the moisture. ← Good tip. Thanks.

I personally prefer to put fruit into sorbets, or to serve a good ice cream with fresh fruit (Cinnamon Ice Cream and fresh peaches...mmmmmmm), rather than make fruit ice creams, partially for the reason you describe and partly because I don't like biting into little frozen chunks of fruit. Other disagree. Were you able to strain significant pulp and seed out of the berries (without losing too much volume and juice)? I fond that this helps concentrate the flavor. Also, I wouldn't be afraid to dissolve a little sugar and the tiniest pinch of salt into the puree/juice before adding it to the mix.

My family does a lot of picnicking at night, which I guess is relevant -- the mimes are invisible, all the fire-eaters and tourists seem to be somewhere else (except for us ) and you don't have to wrestle others for a spot of shade.

Here's a the unedited version of a piece I originally wrote for the Washington Post a couple of years back, aimed more at those comtemplating taking up the freezer for the first time than veteran crankers but, I'd like to think, helpful and amusing. If you're near a Pottery Barn, BTW, they had Cuisinart Ice Cream makers for sale earlier this summer, and were throwing in an extra cooling thing-y for free, which is nice. I actually thing the ice/rocksalt makers give a slightly better product, but the ones I see around are brutally expensive, in the $150 range, versus $50 for the Cuisinart. ******* An unofficial count at the Georgetown Safeway turns up well over 200 different ice creams, sorbets, and frozen god-knows-whats, ready to be carried home and devoured, preferably directly from the carton before roommates or a spouse can get at it. So, why make your own? First, because Ben and Jerry don’t haunt the local bodegas waiting for those extraordinary Haitian mangoes, preferred base for the world’s most unctuous sorbet, to come into season and ripen perfectly. Second, because even with far more than 32 flavors to choose from, mass marketers can never exactly match your own taste, menu and secret vices. And finally, homemade tastes even better than you than you think -- and it’s easier to make than you’d imagine. Like most good cooking, ice cream- or sorbet-making is half done by the time you leave the market. The quality ingredients you select make your product taste dramatically better than even the most earnestly produced hand-scooped treat. That, and freshness. You wouldn’t know it from the advertising or the packaging that comes with commercial ice cream, but frozen desserts are actually delicate and short-lived. Made with fresh fruits and high quality dairy products, they are best consumed they day they are made or – as with Huey Long’s fictional doppelganger, Governor Willie Stark, who allowed that he might run for re-election if he kept “relishing that peach ice cream for breakfast” -- first thing the following day. In addition to Governor Stark, the story of frozen desserts is larded with politicians and celebrities: Nero, Catherine d’Medici, Marco Polo and Charles I all figure prominently in popular histories of the dish. Happily, we can dispense with these Old Europeans because our own founding fathers – and mothers – have a legitimate claim as the architects of the modern ice age. Local boys Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were early ice cream pioneers. Jefferson left us the oldest known American recipe for the dessert, and Washington invested in an early ice cream-making machine. And many credit Dolly Madison with elevating after-dinner ices from a curiosity to a genuine trend, when she served ice cream at her husband’s inaugural ball. Her influence is still strong in Washington, where the annual Ice Cream Social may be Capitol Hill’s most anticipated lobbying event. And First Lady Laura Bush has helped her husband overcome his distaste for formal events by capping each of his three state dinners with a frozen treat: mango-coconut ice cream for President and Mrs. Fox of Mexico; ginger-almond ice cream for President and Mrs. Kwasniewski of Poland; and a mango-coconut (again!) “lei” to President and Mr. Arroyo of the Philippines. Obviously, this is the perfect stuff for a Washington 4th of July. But first you’ll need an ice cream maker. You can still find the occasional hand-cranked model around, but they tend to be expensive and too large, in addition to demanding. Today, almost everyone makes ice cream in an electric machine that relies on a coolant-filled sealed bucket, reminiscent of a huge thermos. You have to plan ahead with one of these, chilling them overnight in the freezer. But once it’s ready, there’s nothing more convenient. With your machine unpacked – or pulled out of the basement where it’s sat since the wedding -- and the bucket cooling quiescently in the freezer, it’s time to figure out what to make. A cookbook or on-line search will turn up a bewildering spectrum of frozen desserts, involving various combinations of fruit, sweetener, egg yolk or white, flavoring agents, cream and milk. So, follow Emerson’s command to simplify accept only two frozen desserts: sorbet and ice cream. Sorbet made with pureed fruit or with fruit juice, natural sweetener and, sometimes, a background flavor which may include fresh herbs or liquor. And ice cream made of eggs, cream and milk, combined into a custard base, and flavored as you see fit. Ice cream is bass, sorbet is treble. Which one to serve depends on your mood, what’s available in the market, and what diets your guests are on. In an Atkins era, butterfat-laden ice cream is almost dietetically correct. For everyone else, sorbet is as close to health food as you can get while still feeding a sweet tooth. If you’ve never made either, start with sorbet. Just puree and strain the ripest, most luscious fruit you can find – summer berries are perfect. Add a pinch of salt, and honey or a simple syrup, and a hint of something that contrasts with the main ingredient -- a teaspoon of balsamic vinegar for strawberries, perhaps, or lime juice for mango. Navigate by your own taste buds. Ice cream seems a little more complex, until you’ve made a crème anglaise – the custard cream at the base of great ice cream – a couple of times. But it’s actually pretty simple. Beat sugar into egg yolks until it dissolves. Boil a half milk-half heavy cream mixture. Pour the boiling cream into the eggs all at once, whisking relentlessly, and then returning the mixture to the pot. Stir over very low heat until the crème anglaise coats the back of a wooden spoon. In either case, chill the resulting mixture to refrigerator temperature before pouring it into the machine. Freeze according to manufacturer’s directions, and add any solid flavorings just before you turn the machine off. Scoop it into a chilled container and harden in the freezer. For best results, eat a light summer dinner on your patio or back porch, while dessert chills, toasting the wisdom of Washington, Jefferson and Madison, and cultivating Washington’s summer weather like an old friend…the only thing that can improve your homemade treat is a hot summer evening to eat it on. No wonder the founders were screaming for ice cream. And remember: without stabilizers and additives, homemade desserts can turn pretty solid overnight, and the flavors fade fast. So eat lots. And don’t forget to wash the bucket and freeze it before you turn in -- you’ll want to make more tomorrow.

Maybe this guy is not as ignorant as you put it and maybe he is a fine connaisseur in case he ordered a bottle of your best wine and asked to have the bottle carafer which is what I understand from your post. It is acceptable and highly advisable to "Carafer" a good young wine or "Decanter" a vintage fine wine. The idea to transpose a young wine into a Carafe is to aerate the wine and get rid of extra tanin thus revealing the beauty of the wine. You really should not drink wine immediately after the bottle is uncorked and wait at least for few minutes by swirling the wine around to oxigenate in your glass. Carafer is valid for both red and certain white wines. You should give a little time for the aeration before tasting the wine and if you are familiar with the restaurant, they could carafer your wine in advance. On the connaisseur and fashion scale, carafer is pretty high on the list and people who do so are not as ignorant as they seem to be. On the other hand people who do not know this particular wine tournure, would draw a wrong conclusion. I will leave the Decanter part for another time. ← pretty dubious. Even if he were aksing to have his wine aerated, he would have, first, ordered a specific bottle and, second, likely conjugated the verb. "Can you carafe that for me?" Or he would have said "decant" - I've never actually heard anyone use the verb "carafer" in the U.S.

I didn't realize Eric Kayser was legendary, but his bakery was right down the street from one of my hotels in Paris...great, great bread. And close to the quais and the Pont des Arts.

Others with more experience will weigh in, but I don't think you can walk more than a couple of hundred meters in Paris without hitting a decent picnic spot. I prefer the quais along the Seine, across the channel from Notre Dame or Isle St. Louis. Just west of the Berthillon Ice Cream (on Isle St. Louis, it's famous, you'll have no problem finding it if you're on the island) there were a a couple shops with everything you need for a picnic, and you can just walk over to the quais, but Paris is full of great places for bread, charcuterie, cheese and excellent prepared foods, so just keep your eyes open as you wander between the museums and the cafes. The north side of the Jardin de Luxembourg is pretty swell, too, with trees, benches and a reflecting pool. And, if you're in the 7th, pop down the market on Rue Cler, near the ecole Militaire Metro stop. It's got everything you need. Though the best baguettes are actually a block or two from the market (try to hunt down Patricia Well's Food Lovers Guide to Paris , it's got everything else, including one of Paris's most celebrated cheese shops, and you can walk down to a sunset picnic at the Eiffel Tour.

You need to lift a roll of butchers paper. If I can get paid for that at say $5 a lb. on average that's a profit center. Don't forget that the scales weigh in the Hundredth's and rounds up. ← I have hefted butcher paper in my time. I know that a roll of it is not light. I'm sure that, over a year, selling the butcher paper would would yied up, oh, a couple of hundred bucks. Maybe. But any butcher so venal that they are actively trying to pad the profits with 4 cent's worth of paper per transaction is going to be fucking you over so badly on the price and quality of the meat itself that the cost of the paper is insignificant. I maintain that it's some false sense of officiousness and decorum -- pre-wrapped crap from the Safeway/Albertsons now being our benchmark as to what meat's supposed to look like -- that drives this process. And, if the meat's actually butcher quality-stuff, either decide that the nickel per transaction that he's "stealing" is worth the price or learn to say, politely and without accusing anybody: "Can you weigh that out for me before you wrap it? Thanks." Why not ask the guy "what's up?" rather than casting on-line aspersions on someone whom you haven't talked to about his "habit." He's not going to come over the counter with a filleting knife, and he might actually start to recognize when you come in, and get you better service. For all the grifters out there, nine people out of ten are actually not trying to steal from you. Give the guy a chance before you assume the worst.

I utterly don't believe that the weight of butcher paper makes any significant difference regardless of the price of the meat or the length of the time being discussed. I can't conceive of a butcher trying to run up profit one sheet of butcher paper at a time. The salient point here is that you lose the moment where the butcher slaps the meat on the scale and gives you the look, and you look over weight, the cost and the slab(s) itself and give the nod or ask, "you got anything a little bigger/smaller?"

Isn't the full recipe "Lark's Tonue in Aspic?" And, according to this transcript of an investigation in England, lark's vomit was used by certain unscrupulous confectioners as a flavoring agent in their candies. Milton: (insulted) Mock frog? We use no artificial preservatives or additives of any kind! Praline: Nevertheless, I must warn you that in future you should delete the words 'crunchy frog', and replace them with the legend 'crunchy raw unboned real dead frog', if you want to avoid prosecution. Milton: What about our sales? Praline: I'm not interested in your sales, I have to protect the general public. Now how about this one. (superintendent enters) It was number five, wasn't it? (superintendent nods) Number five, ram's bladder cup. (exit superintendent) What kind of confection is this? "Milton: We use choicest juicy chunks of fresh Cornish ram's bladder, emptied, steamed, flavoured with sesame seeds whipped into a fondue and garnished with lark's vomit. Praline: Lark's vomit? Milton: Correct. Praline: Well it don't say nothing about that here. Milton: Oh yes it does, on the bottom of the box, after monosodium glutamate. Praline: (looking) Well I hardly think this is good enough. I think it would be more appropriate if the box bore a large red label warning lark's vomit. Milton: Our sales would plummet...." Full transcript here.. Apparently, lark-eating may have been more a 70s British phenomenon than an ancient Roman one.

Let me get Diva's back here for a moment before getting on with my own little rant. The problem is that once a dish reaches a certain critical mass, it starts crowding other stuff off the menu: those stupid Caesar's salads; Fettucini Alfreda and, generally, mediocre-at-best pasta dishes; grilled salmon; fried calamari... and, arguably, baby backs. Why? Cutomers embrace the trendy and familiar, restaurant supply houses figure out how to make them easy for and profitable for restaurants to serve. People, especially accountants, are risk-averse. What's the problem? Eating out gets boring. Restaurants begin serving food not because they do it well, but because everybody else is doing it. And you go to try someplace new (or find yourself in strange environs) and you end with culinary deja vu all over again. Diva's neighborhood is flooded with baby backs. They're probably not that good, bcause they're not the product of cheffly passion for babybacks; they're the product of menu consultants and pre-packaged sauce and customers too timid to try the full-size version. No wonder she's sick of them. I would be, too. But in my neighborhood, where we're a little more yuppified, it's summertime and what I'm sick of is: Slicing, not cooking. I'm not impressed with that $12 hand-crafted artisanal heirloom organic salad you're serving, chef. I can slice tomatoes myself, I have basil in the garden. And that wedge of iceberg lettuce? Same thing. For dessert, do me a favor. Put the peaches in some ice cream or something, make me a plum tart, do a little work that I can't do at home. Because for the next two months, my kitchen is going to have just as much great raw produce lying around as yours (and I'll have the fruit flies to prove it). Show me your chops. I can slice at home.