mrbigjas

excellent topic, katbert, especially as i've been experimenting recently to try and make fries the way i like them at home. recent experiences: --ten stone CAN have great fries; as good as any in town. sometimes they're seriously oversalted, though. last time i was there, last month, they weren't as great as they were the several times before. --black sheep's fries aren't so good. however, they do make an excellent burger.

and how was it? i noticed that wine today at 19th & chestnut and thought about picking up a bottle or two. on a sadder note for me, a poor soul who works in nonprofit and can't be drinking $25 bottles of wine every night even when it's discounted from $40, i notice that my formerly favorite 'swilling wine that costs nothing and goes with everything' has gone up in price. yes, i'm talking about the cuvée de peña, which i used to get for $5.99 a bottle, until deborah scoblionkov told everyone about it and they went out and bought up all the 2002. apparently both they and the PALCB picked up on the fact that they make a damn good wine for practically nothing--they fancied up their label for 2003, and the price has gone up to $7.99. while this is still a very cheap wine (and i haven't opened it yet), it's just ... ...well, it's not amazingly cheap anymore. just pretty cheap. and after all for those of us who are the poor wine drinkers, these are key distinctions to make.

p.s. tonight we ate the leftovers. sliced really thinly, and then very very gently warmed in a demiglace that i made last week (diluted some) just till heated through, then served on a great baguette with 4-year aged butler's cheddar. kind of a french dip sandwich but so much better. i have to say it was freaking great.

i bet you're right. and now i'm thinking, because it was so small, throwing in a bunch of heat right at the end would obviously affect the whole thing more than if it were a big roast. and it did. that would have been a good idea, and it's how i cook thick steaks. i wonder why i didn't do that. usually i blast it in the oven right at the beginning like katie described in her reply, but last night i kinda lost track of time and didn't have time to heat the oven up enough. i barely got it warmed to just the temp i set it at before i had to put in the meat, which i don't consider preheating an oven, really.

this is just one of those things that popped into my head, like things sometimes do for no real reason. how come there are no famous--or even internationally recognized--german whiskeys?l i mean, as michael jackson said in his scotch book, whiskey is really no more than distilled beer. and we all know that germany is famous for its beer. and germany makes brandy (i'm drinking one right now), and kirschwasser, and various bitters, so you can't say "germans don't distill" or something. a cursory couple of web searches didn't turn up anything more than a mention on someone's web page that said something to the effect that "they also make whiskey in other places like japan and germany." i wonder why that is. anyone?

definitely--thanks for the info!

i've got a bottle of limoncello going right now. 10 lemons and a lime microplaned into a bottle of 100-proof absolut. i did them about a week ago, maybe a week and a half, and i shake it every time i wander by. the shreds are so small from the microplane, though, that i have to wonder at this point how much more infusing is really going on at this point. i'll let it go for a while longer anyways. i wonder how i know when it's ready.

ok it's a small eye roast, slightly under 1.5 lbs. i throw it in the oven for a while at 400 with a probe thermometer in it set to go off at 125 F. the thermometer goes off and i pull it out, take it out of the pan and set it on a cutting board, uncovered, figuring it'll go up to 130 or so. so i tossed the salad and put the bearnaise in a dish, and by that time it had gone up to 136! I sliced it and it was a nice medium pink--definitely not as rare as i like roast beef. so my question is: why did it go up that much? is it the smallness of the piece of meat? i figured that would make it go up less, not more, because it wouldn't hold as much heat, but i could be convinced otherwise. the fact that i cranked up the oven toward the end to brown the outside? so the outside was actually hotter than it would have been when i took it out, and that transferred to the inside? thoughts, anyone?

they do! i love that they have those apples, but i wish they had the macouns. those scuppernongs they're carrying are freaking delicious (they're the green ones). i don't know why they have them now when iovine's is already done with them for the year.

i have to warn you that the peaches aren't much good anymore. but it's all good, because i think the pears might be better this year than they've ever been. last week i was eating one and the juice was running down my arm, and i couldn't keep it under control. it was made worse by the fact that i was eating lunch at my desk at the time. d'oh. they had the last of the plums at haltmann's today--just prune plums are left. and they have macouns (the best apple variety, all things considered) at kauffman's. also unpasteurized cider. i bought a half-gallon of it today, but haven't had any yet. hmmm.... this is turning into rlibkind's "today at the RTM" or something.

i agree with the smoked ribeye. when we had it i couldn't stop going on about how it tasted like smoke, but that didn't overpower it, and it still tasted like an amazing steak. good stuff.

i like their small country white loaf. i use it for everything. and i haven't had a bad one of them yet. i do love a baguette though. also they carry some great butters there.

i have that cookbook--i had forgotten it had a ketchup recipe in it. i'll have to take a look. ever since i bought it i've been obsessed with eating radishes and radish greens. how is the ketchup? does it taste... well, like ketchup? my grandmother used to make it growing up but we never liked it much.

went back to the same store today and got this: now THAT'S more like it. conclusion: for the next while i'm going to have to ask to see the baguettes before buying one. but they're still making good ones.

yeah but then i'd feel like i'm doing something right. i'm thinking next year i'll get a plot somewhere and grow more tomatoes than my measly backyard will allow. that's a surefire way to give yourself a good case of the runs.

that's a bummer. maybe i'll send a letter over with these pics and ask them what's up. wish they had an e-mail 'contact us' on their site. i'll be sure to take a look at the baguettes before buying them next time, that's for sure. (the last few loaves of bread have been great--it's just the baguettes that have had this problem) welcome to the forum, shinyboots. thanks for your comments.

katie--i just realized that I have about 8 of the pears here, and a bunch of apples of several different kinds, including the ones that are like macouns, and the ones they had this week, which are approximately the size of a small child's head. damn heirloom varieties--i can never remember the names. i can bring you a pear or two to hold you over one of these afternoons on my way home. mottmott-- m.o.t. = member of the tribe, i.e. jewish andrew--there are other things worth preserving: tomatoes (whole), peaches in syrup are OK, corn can be frozen rather than canned, as can peas, and.... that's about it that we ever did. i've been having the urge for pickled watermelon rind lately, but not enough to do that myself. i'll just buy a jar from kauffman's. everyone--one other thing at the farmer's market this week if you can go is the unpasteurized cider from ... uh, the other orchard that isn't north star? the one with the regular apple varieties. this is the shiznit right here--it tastes like the cider we had growing up. there's something about pasteurizing cider that takes some flavor component i can't quite identify out of it. and i have a killer immune system so i'm taking that risk...

several times in the last couple of months, i've gotten a terrible baguette from metropolitan, the most recent being yesterday. i mean, take a look at this thing: i know my pics aren't great, but i just snapped them real quick just now and my camera doesn't have a 'halogen' white balance setting. but see the shine on the bread? that's not my camera doing that--it really looks that way. see how pale it is? look at the third pic--see how the outside is practically the same color as the inside? now, leaving aside the fact that it was crushed/bent at one spot and they shouldn't have sold it to me (i didn't notice till i was in the car on the way home--although if they had cooked it enough it wouldn't have bent in the first place, because it would have a decent crust on it), this is not a good baguette. this is emphatically not the bread that, when i got back from paris having eaten bread at several award-winning bakeries, i said, this bakery is as good as any of theirs, and was only overstating mildly. this thing tasted all right once i baked a piece of it for another ten minutes, but unbaked the texture is like the supermarket 'baguettes' you get at the a&p up in lycoming county where my grandparents live. so anyway, does anyone know what's up? is this just several glitchy coincidences that i can ignore, or is metropolitan just getting too big for good quality control? i'm no professional baker, but i can see that that loaf ain't done yet.

they don't come to my neighborhood anymore, but they do come to the rittenhouse square farmer's market. that's right, i'm talking about north star orchards and their asian pears. last week was the second week i saw them, and i am as usual gorging myself on them. only the hosui variety is in now, and they're not my favorite, but they're head and shoulders over the real imported ones that you pay top dollar for in supermarkets. and yes, i know we talk about this every year. but i'm doing it again. also: kauffman's produce at the terminal had the first macouns i saw last week. they're my favorite apple, which i'm sure is as much due to its short season as the fact that my second favorite apple (winesap) is due to its long season. either way, it's mainly the taste. north star carries a similar variety whose name i forget, but that doesn't quite have the sweetness of real macouns. damn close though. they're still there, and they label them as 'similar to macouns'--i highly recommend them if you can get there. i've been able to restrain myself from buying the other apples and pears, because peaches are still around, and i feel that if stone fruits are still producing, i shouldn't move too far into pomes. but that's just me. my family put up 87 pints of corn today, while i had the most annoying day ever at work--where the internet filtering system picked up forums.egullet.org as a blockable site yesterday morning. those three facts are coincidental, but they all suck. good god. we're heading too quickly in to fall. next year, i give up. i'm going back to my upstate PA roots--i'm canning. next year is the year. who else is watching the late summer/early fall produce come in? am i the only one? katie, i know you're almost as psyched about asian pears as i am....come on, wax rhapsodic for a second, y'all.

fixed that for you. best oysters i ever had. possibly the best sake i've ever had--by which i mean it's something i would enjoy drinking all the time, which most any sake i've ever had has not been. and sandy, i'm not an exile from anywhere. and andrew, it's usenet--i don't know if you bother with it.

mighta been $65. i'm not sure. it was right in that range, though. we did finish off a bottle of wine and a bottle of sake while we were there, and then had drinks afterward...

hm.... i'm thinking $55 or so, plus tip? i think it depends on what he serves you that night. the price sure seemed fair, even low, when we got the bill at the end of the meal, though.

p.s. mulcahy: glad you came, glad you had fun. come back anytime.

i've had the tripe sandwich from george's and don't like it much, to tell you the truth. it can be real chewy, and has that flavor... for lack of a better word, it tastes like semidigested dirt and grass, which isn't that surprising, really, if you think about it--all tripe can have that flavor to some extent, but honeycomb has it more often, it seems to me. i don't know if it's inherent to tripe itself or if it's insufficient cleaning--and is there really ever sufficient tripe cleaning? i don't have enough experience with preparing it to know.

it is, isn't it? spaghetttti, i'm curious: did you do any processing on that dragonfruit pic in the first post on this thread? the cut-open version looks so much more fluorescent than the uncut version. or is it actually that bright?