mags

Hmmm...and what about the malt vinegar? Actually, I had read that it was the Portugese who introduced batter-frying to the Japanese, in the 16th or 17th century. A Portugal --> Japan connection makes more sense to me than the Japan -->Portugal connection, because outside of tempura, Japanese cuisine tends so much to be water-based, rather than oil-based.

I love pork belly, and have sometimes been lucky enough to buy the "wild boar" belly from the fella at the Union Square Greenmarket who sells "wild boar." But half the time he's gone by the time I get my lazy butt over to 16th Street. Does anybody have another NYC source?

For what it's worth, I'm on Atkins, and yesterday I ate raspberries, zucchini, a tomato, some onion, scallion, lettuce, and bean sprouts. Today my plan is to finish up the raspberries, and have a red pepper with my tuna salad for lunch, and a cucumber salad (with red onion and jalapeno peppers) with my chicken sate for dinner. Before ripping into the "wildly hyped Atkins diet," you might want to look into what it actually involves. Denigrating something without checking the facts is no better than hyping it without checking.

Pan, you LIKE Lafayette? Yeesh. Their prices are very appealing but jeez, all their stuff tastes to me like deeply mediocre "fancy" Jewish pastry -- the kind of stuff that used to appear on the "extravaganza of desserts" tables at Long Island bar mitzvahs when I was a kid. Bleh. Payard all the way. Though what I really miss is Patisserie Friandise, which used to make the only chocolate cakes for which I would actually go to the Upper East Side. (Ok, my mother lives there, too, but that's a side issue .)

Thank you all so much for the suggestions. The options I've seen look amazing. One more question: How much of a design do I need to have in order to get a price-quote? I ask because I'm about as handy with a pencil as ummm.....as someone who really can't draw, and I'm hoping these folks can come up with a design based on the elements I'd like to include.

My shop will be throwing a big party at the end of April, and I want to commission an elaborate cake -- probably in the shape of a pile of books (since it's a bookshop) -- for about 200 people. Anybody have any recommendations in the NYC area? I'm looking for something beautiful, yummy, and (ideally) not so expensive that I have to ummm...toss off motorists on the West Side Highway to pay the freight (with apologies to Tony).

That's ok. A friend of mine who grew up in Ohio swears that when he was a kid, a local chemical company ran a citywide contest to come up with a name for this new product they'd developed, that de-iced the locks on car doors. The winning entry: "Drek." That is, until somebody pointed out that in German and Yiddish, "drek" means "shit."

Wow, I had no idea there was so much variation in the amount of sugar! I've been happy with the various Lee Kum Kee sauces I've used in the past -- and my local fancy-dancy gourmet store carries them -- so I didn't even think to check out other brands. (Hitting self in head) And using the plum sauce as a replacement is also a great idea. Thanks to you both!

Dinner at Matsuri -- a high-concept Japanese place -- to the swinging sounds of Clifton Chenier and his Zydeco All-Stars. I always say nothing goes with sushi like accordion-music. But, if I can digress a little, that was nothing compared to my very favorite incongruous music. I was in a New York City cab about five years ago, very late at night, when another car whizzed in front of us, narrowly avoiding a bad crash. My cab driver screeched to a halt, and we both took a few seconds to calm down. Then, in very heavily accented and broken English -- I think he was Egyptian -- he asked if I minded if he put on some music, to relax. Sure, I said. He fumbled with a boom box, plugged in a tape, hit the volume, and out poured the dulcet sounds of the original-cast album of "Camelot," with Julie Andrews warbling away about "the simple joys of maidenhood." Not exactly what I had been expecting.

Have you done a careful comparison with the situation poor people are in in more egalitarian countries - like most other industrialized countries - such that you can make this statement authoritatively? And, to get this back to the topic of food, how about the diets of poor people in Canada, Europe, and Japan? Are they better (more nutritious, less pesticide-laden, whatever) than the diets of poor people in the U.S., and if so (how would we establish that, though?), isn't that a measure of being "better off"? I think we'd all be better off not posting rhetoric and slogans and sticking to things that are quantifiable or at least qualifiable. Otherwise, we'll just have a "Yes it is!" "No it isn't!" shouting match, which will neither serve anyone nor be entertaining. Tsk, Pan, there you go again, trying to insert sanity and reason into a topic that was CLEARLY intended to invite nothing but bombast and hot air. Will you never learn?

Bravo, Heather.

Interesting, Fresco, and thanks. But I disagree with the author's statement that cilantro was popularized in the U.S. by Thai restaurants -- I think the influence of Mexican food was just as strong. Maybe it's his Maryland-bias talking.

My very boring picks: Split pea with pork products Carrot and rice Fresh tomato My gazpacho ( finally perfected -- trick for me is sweating the garlic in the olive oil) Really great chicken broth with dill Curried parsnip Don't like fruit soups, don't like cold soups except gazpacho, and don't really like soups I have to eat with a spoon -- I like drinking the stuff, and bits get in the way.

Guess they're not real into the whole conserve-fuel, help-the-environment, reduce-dependence-on-foreign-oil thing, hunh?

I read somewhere a while ago (how's that for specificity?) that people who taste cilantro as "soapy" are in fact allergic to cilantro, with the allergy manifesting itself as a chemical reaction that actually changes the taste. In other words, it's not that they taste the same thing as the rest of us, and just don't like it; they actually taste something different. "Allergy" here is probably just shorthand for "somewhat unusual and unpleasant chemical reaction to a given substance." I have no idea if this is true, but it ...well, with no knowledge whatsoever, I'll say it seems sensible to me.

Sounds to me more like a feast of immaculate consumption

Tsk! I think everybody is overlooking a dictum from Calvin Trillin, who noted -- in one of his paeans to Arthur Bryant's -- that the sublime taste of the ribs is imparted largely by the counterman's hand. Similarly, I think the sublime-ness of the hand-schlepped item is imparted, at least in part, by the loving hand of him/her what brung it. But it does remind me of one of my all-time favorite eavesdroppings. Just days after the beginning of, ahem, the first Gulf War, I was scheduled to fly from London to New York, but a flight delay stuck me for several hours in the busy-class lounge. Nearby, knocking back many restorative whiskeys, was a very rotund and deeply bewhildered elderly gentleman, who had the kind of fruity, Robert Morley-type voice that NOBODY in England has had for decades. He had apparently been taking the cure at some kind of ultra-secluded facility in Switzerland -- the sort of place with no access to disturbing news from the outside world -- and was now returning, via London, to his loved ones in New York. When he had attempted to board the plane in Zurich, he refused to put through the security scanner the large box he was clutching to his chest. When asked what was in the box, he replied that it was "a bombe." As he told it to his companions -- and to all of us listening in the lounge -- security personnel instantly surrounded him, wrestled him to the ground, threw some sort of blanket over the box, and started beating on the blanket-covered item with heavy things, all while our fellow was stuttering over and over again, "But it's a chocolate truffle cake. It's a chocolate truffle cake." Eventually, when nothing had exploded other than vast quantities of chocolate ganache, they returned the box to him. He was still holding it in the lounge -- completely mashed and wrecked, of course, and smeared with goo -- while his companions explained to him why airport security had recently tightened. He just kept quivering and blinking, clutching his box and repeating sadly "a chocolate truffle cake."

MANY thanks to all respondents, and particularly to Anna N. Yes, I think a variety of sugar-subs -- including Splenda -- would work here, and that's what I'm hoping to use. I had found the recipe that starts with peanut butter (!) but that, in combo with the use of garlic powder (!!) made me pretty skeptical. And the other one doesn't use any bean past at all. Hmmmm. I'll try them both and report back. Thanks again. And yeah, my goal is to come as close to Lee Kum Kee as possible -- that is, the commercial stuff. (Deep sigh) But not going to try today, apparently. Cheery note from landlady indicates no heat and no water till tomorrow. At least it's stopped snowing.

Loser was TOTALLY robbed! And.........oh man, that was just so weird. Who WERE these people? Ron Popeil was a judge? William Shatner? He seems to have had his own 15 minutes of fame plus an entire small city's. It made me realize that a great deal of what I found charming (for a while) about Iron Chef was the ham-handed translation. Rendered in the original, I just found it dumb. I think for me the weirdest moment was at the end, when Shatner was standing next to...ahem, the loser, who looked to be about three feet tall. And I thought, oh goodness, I never realized the gentleman in question was a.......an extremely short person. Eventually a long-shot revealed that Shatner was standing on some kind of plinthe.

That was my reaction, essentially "why?" I can't think of any use for it, unless mags is making Peking duck from scratch, too. My wife cooks Chinese food every day of the year, and we've never even had haixian sauce in the house. It might be interesting to try making one's own soy sauce, though. Not making Peking duck, but I do like making char siu. And I'm fond of a number of other Chinese recipes that call for it.

You think? I had actually never heard of anyone making it. Kind of like making soy sauce. And I was afraid that if I Googled "recipe" and "hoisin sauce" I'd get a zillion recipes USING hoisin. But it's worth a try.

Has anyone ever tried to make hoisin? And just as important, does anyone have ANY idea what a recipe might be? I love hoisin sauce, but the sugar in it plays havoc with my health, and I would love to try to make my own. The one low-carb version I've seen on the market -- from Steel's -- tastes lousy.

My worst was about 20 years ago, when I was living in Boston. Some friends of a friend had recently moved to town, and invited me to dinner. When it started blizzarding I called to beg off -- since I didn't have a car, and getting to their place would involve a good half-hour's slog through the snow -- but they were clearly offended, so I wimped, and said I would come. Got there to find their boiler was broken -- no heat. We sat in the freezing-cold kitchen, all wearing our parkas and scarves and mittens. For reasons that were never made clear, they had recently opted to strip all fat from their diet -- a fact they had neglected to mention ahead of time. Dinner was a large bowl of steamed and completely unseasoned broccoli, which rapidly chilled in the sub-zero temperature of the kitchen. With this I was given a small spoonful of undercooked and still crunchy brown rice and an unfortunately large spoonful of a truly unpleasant condiment with the texture of phlegm. (I have since realized it was natto.) As a salad, there was a bowl of canned, undrained beansprouts. I had brought a bottle of wine, but it went unopened in favor of blessedly hot green tea, which all of us swilled compulsively both for the warmth and to choke down the meal. For ambience, they played a recording they had made -- during a recent sojurn of do-goodery on a reservation -- of Native American chants. It was a very long recording. It was a very, very long dinner. And I never saw them again.

Thanksgiving dinner at Washington Park, Jonathan Waxman's new place, and gawd was it good. Salad with prosciutto and roasted mushrooms of various kinds, then seriously great venison (none of us opted for turkey) partnered with mashed potatoes, mashed sweets, stuffing, and brussels sprouts gratin -- easily the best brussels sprouts preparation I've ever had, and I love my sprouts! And terrific pumpkin pie for dessert. The only sad part is no leftovers, but since I'm trying to avoid starch as a rule -- and Thanksgiving, in general is a starch-fest -- this was actually part of the plan. But we ate at around five, and you know, a turkey-and-stuffing sandwich with some cranberry sauce on top would taste very delicious right about now.

And me what can't even raise a spider plant. I am in AWE.