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Andrew Fenton

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Posts posted by Andrew Fenton

  1. It's pretty clear that Veracruzana has hired psychics to drive around in trucks, waiting for you to get hungry so that they can bring you food.

    They could probably bring the food even before you called; but that would shatter your precious illusion of free will. And who would want that? Nobody, that's who.

  2. It's that time of year when KitchenAid has a sale on attachments, and I'm thinking of buying the juicer.  Is it good?  Does it truly do key limes up to grapefruit efficiently?  Does it really strain the juice?  Do blops of pulp fall off that shelf thingy into your juice receptacle?  Does the plastique hold up?  Most importantly, do the physics of that thing work?  Why doesn't juice fly onto the Venetian blinds, or does it?

    I have the juicer: the best thing I can say about it is that, if you have a KA already, the juicer takes up a lot less space than a stand-alone juicer would. That's important if (as I do) you have a small kitchen. But other than that, the KA juicer isn't that great. It does handle different-sized fruits, which is a plus. But the pulp strainer is small and kind of flimsy, and the angle is a little uncomfortable. If you make a lot of juice, and/or you have the space for a juicer, I'd just buy one.

    But the juicer is the weakest of the attachments that I own. I'll share in the love for the pasta roller: a motor is a HUGE help, as is the height. And I've been very happy with the meat grinder/sausage stuffer, and use them both frequently.

  3. Has anyone tried baking the crusts, freezing them to make this as quick as frozen (ick) pizza?

    I do this all the time. My pizza recipe produces four medium, thin crust pizzas; I'll make and eat two of them that night. The other two crusts get par-baked (two to three minutes on the stone), cooled and frozen.

    With the leftover crusts, I'll just pre-heat the stone, top the frozen crust, and bake normally. Since it starts out frozen, the crust and cheese end up cooked at about the same time: I've never had problems with over- or under-baked pizza. It's not as good as fresh, but it's still very good, and basically effortless.

  4. Ken Starr restaurants are right out.

    Um, I think you mean Steven Starr. Ken Starr's restaurant would be very, very different ("Tonight's special prosecution is the Impeachment Melba!")

    anyway, I agree that Chinatown springs first to the mind... off the very top of my head, there's Nan Zhou (maybe the best soup in the city, for $5.50) and dim sum: on Sunday, we had a terrific meal at HK Golden Phoenix, with tons of food for $14/person.

  5. What I won't be able to find elsewhere once the market closes for the season are the wonderful baguettes and croisssants from Versailles Baking. The Pennsauken boulanger only sells retail at the Headhouse and Haddonfield markets. Otherwise all their customers are wholesale accounts.

    their pastries are pretty good, but i was unimpressed with the breads i bought from them. both the baguette and the country white loaf i bought had a weird texture, almost crumbly. like, they didn't hold together that well when you sliced them.

    And this might be kind of obvious, but stay away from their bagels, which have a very un-bagel-like texture and are oddly salty to boot.

    Their croissants are okay-- I don't love them, but I still buy them-- but I really like their cheese danishes. Those are great.

  6. I'd wondered whether there was a way one could re-crisp a steamed-in-the-box delivery pie.  I don't have a stone, however.  Would just putting it on the oven rack or my pizza screen work?

    I've put pizza on a baking sheet, and it works okay, but not as well as a stone. You can get a pizza stone for like $20; if you eat pizza regularly, it's probably worth it.

  7. Bumping this up to say that we had a margherita pizza delivered from Slice last night. That's a very, very good pizza, one of the best I've had in the city. It's a different style from Rustica, and I like 'em both, so it's great to have another option.

    N.B.: the delivery time on a Friday night was an hour and fifteen minutes, and when it arrived it wasn't as hot as it could have been. I should have anticipated this and heated up the pizza stone in the oven for a couple of minutes' crisping; next time, I will.

  8. " Three private equity firms — Bain Capital, the Texas Pacific Group and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners — control most of Burger King’s stock.

    Hey, that's the company Mitt Romney founded. I don't know what his current involvement with Bain is, but it'd be awfully interesting if a reporter on the campaign trail asked Governor Romney whether he thinks farm workers ought to get that extra penny.

  9. I've bought rabbit at Godshall's in the Reading Terminal Market.  I'm pretty sure, though, that it wasn't fresh, but frozen.

    On second thought, I think it was actually fresh. At least, the guy cut the rabbit into itty-bitty bunny pieces for me. I guess he could have cut up a frozen rabbit, but it seems more likely that he cut up a fresh one.

    oh hell, I have no idea. but they definitely carry the bunnies there!

  10. Glad they were open! I stopped by on Tuesday, and found the place empty except for the wowner, who was shaking her head and saying over and over "it's an awful day... an awful day..." Needless to say, they weren't serving food!

    The scallion pancake looks terrific; I can't wait to try this place...

  11. I think it's indisputable that most of those leftover-turkey recipes are horrible; their prose admits as much, with their desperate claims to help solve the problem of massive amounts of leftover poultry. The real solution is just to not cook an excessively large bird; just enough for an enjoyable amount of leftovers.

    Still, I like leftover turkey: I like the sandwiches, I like the Thanksgiving-redux meals on Friday and Saturday. Most of all, I really love the turkey soup that follows those meals. The leftover turkey works great in it, and by the end of Thanksgiving weekend, I'm looking forward to something simple, light, with lots of vegetables and broth. So I don't see a real problem there.

  12. Actually, 1955 doesn't seem so late to me. Submarines had been around for a while, but I don't think they really penetrated popular culture (20,000 Leagues under the Sea notwithstanding) until World War II.

    People had been making sandwiches on long loaves for a long time before that, of course. One of the possible etymologies for "hoagie" were the "hokey-pokey men" who, after the opening of HMS Pinafore in Philadelphia in 1879, made and sold sandwiches on long "Pinafore" loaves. There have to be other, older examples as well.

  13. Moriarty's wings are patently awful.

    Just curious: did they get worse than the last time you ate them?

    Not trying to put you on the spot; but your take on them in that thread didn't read as awful.

    Anyway, I agree with the consensus that next time, carpetbagger might do well to be steered in a different direction. (And let us know; I'm sure he'd easily find some local eGulletguides to lead him through the wilderness.)

  14. Thank goodness that the Crivellaros are safe-- and I'll refrain from making off-topic comments about the aptly named Schoolkill Expressway.

    But to this:

    The pork they were bringing to town wound up cushioning the blow and may have helped save them from more serious injury or death. But the pork was lost.

    all I can say is: we salute you, hero pork!

    or to put it another way:

    that's SOME PIG!

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