mrbigjas

heh. have you ever seen those suburbs? they're not exactly levittown.

man i can't wait till i can go out again. i'm heading back to amada post haste.

whoa, i never heard that idea before, and yet the concept makes so much sense i wonder how i've missed it. i have an extra pizza stone and will totally do this next time. how far above should i put it?

"french regional cooking: my nerdy new years resolution II"!

i got two words for ya here: BACON DRIPPINGS.

i'm not sayin you're wrong, i'm just sayin if you made that cheese into a foam and the wine into a gelee, you might enjoy them both more. hahahahahaha anyway, you know, i had an epiphany about yellow string beans this year. i mean, i eat them all the time, along with green beans. they're a perfectly acceptable vegetable in my book, but nothing i search out. but this year my parents grew them, and picked them young, and have been supplying us with as many as we can eat. and the difference between these beans and the standard supermarket green beans is night and day. they're fantastic. we steam them and toss with butter and parsley. or i braise them in olive oil and load them up with piles of basil and mint. or i boil them, shock and serve cold with a mustardy vinaigrette. i've also stir fried them with seasoned pork, shanghai style. and last night i made that laotian salad from hot sour salty sweet, with the peanut/chili/lime/fish/dried shrimp dressing. there's no way you can make them that these beans don't taste good. i haven't gotten tired of them yet. my god, it's depressing that summer is nearly over.

first asian pears of the year! i knew i shoulda gone. dang.

chappie, i was out at borders here in philadelphia, today, and came across this book called country scrapple: an american tradition, by william woys weaver. that's the amazon link; i thought of this thread when i saw it.

wait i suddenly realized the answer to the question posed by the subject of this thread: you eat them because when you kill a chicken, you get two of them, and what are you gonna do, throw them away? that doesn't seem like the right thing to do. might as well learn to cook them some way that you like. i often do various types of scallopine with them, because i'm not convinced that the choice of protein makes that much of a difference in those sorts of dishes--they mainly seem to be about the sauces.

sure it is! cold (well, really just not-hot, not necessarily cold) scrambled eggs are great if they're not soggy ol things sitting around leftover on a plate. nice fluffy cold scrambled eggs, stuffed in a tomato, with a light grating of cheese and some chives on top is a great light lunch.

this right here is a virtual dissection of a squid, including a closeup of how to remove the ink sac.

i can't be the only one to think that a super-greasy fast food burger is just fine cooked all the way through. if it's greasy enough, it's not dry.

i'm disturbed and frankly a little bit offended by the gratuitous slamming of smokey & the bandit II on this thread.

I didn't know it at first either. Seems the Kaiken is the vin de table end of the Montes line, which includes the very fine Montes Alpha. Clearly the winemaker knows what they're doing, so I'm happy to drink skillfully made wine at a bargain price. ← me too, although i have to admit i'm not the hugest fan of kaiken. i discovered this through reading the latest issue of dan berger's newsletter--he was complaining because apparently montes is starting to make wine in california, and they're saying 'we're going to make reds in california that will sell from $60-70 or so. berger's point was, shouldn't you make the wine before you value it? of course, they know how to make some nice wine, so why wouldn't they be able to pull it off? it's only worth what people will pay for it anyway. my prediction: in five years it'll be a chairman's selection and we'll get it for $25. that would be good...

now that sounds like a real party! every time i've been to five guys the cashiers and staff in general have been extraordinarily nice. i mean, like, oddly nice. the thing that i wonder about that place is how long they're going to last without getting sued by someone falling and breaking their neck on the extremely treacherous grease-covered tile floor. i mean, i've come this close to wiping out every time i've been in there.

you should be able to tell if you're getting a full ear by feeling the corn through the husk. there's no need to pull it back, just feel up toward the top; if the kernels drop away you know it's not a full ear. you can also feel those mutant ears where the kernels aren't in rows through the husk. between that and the condition of the silk and knowing when it was picked, you can pick out a dozen ears much more quicly than all the amateurs peeling back the tip of every ear. practice makes perfect. keep trying.

i've had a roast pork hoagie from chickie's in the past, and it was delicious. that's right, deeelicious. wasn't a hot roast pork italian though.

As are we, we drank a whole bunch of the Kaiken when it was in before. As I recall it was around 8 dollars and was a tremendous value. This is still a good price and I also hope the "Ultra" will offer a bonus ← i just learned that kaiken is a montes brand. am i the only one who didn't know that?

interesting. thanks! i do enjoy them--those little buttons have an interesting lifespan, and seem to be good at nearly any age.

is crottin a brand of cheese, or just a method of making chevre a certain way? we have the crottin de chavignol available at a couple of cheese stores here in philadelphia--the same thing, or just a similar cheese from different producers or something? i guess what i'm asking is, are there many crottins, or just the one?

riedel makes a line of stemware for restaurant use that is nicely shaped, nice and thin and yet hard to break--i think it's their R series. runs about $5 a stem. i had a friend in the biz hook me up with a case and i love them.

i can't believe i wrote that.

well, that's why you're here! i mean, the topic doesn't say 'what bob found on his latest visit,' although he is the main man on the topic. although seriously you gotta wonder about that. if they're ready to put up an incorrect sign about peaches at the height of peach season (when peaches from jersey are no worse than those from lancaster), what other kinda b.s. are they pulling? still, good kimchi.

i almost bought a burrata yesterday; they get them in from puglia on saturdays, at dibruno's here in philadelphia. but even that would be pretty much a whole meal for my wife and i, and we can't just live on cheese. i had mussels to make--i copied franci's mussels recipe, and it was great. the interesting part to me was shelling raw mussels, which i've never done before. it took me about 10 to figure out where and how to cut without breaking the shell or hurting myself... i now have five or six cuts on my hands as a result. but it was worth it. they were damn good. (we had some left over since mussels only come in a 2 lb bag here, and i put them in a little gratin dish on top of the sauce tonight and broiled them till the stuffing got crispy again. i know that's kinda french but what the hey). for a vegetable, we had the sweet peppers and onions from the ada boni book. i often don't think of bell peppers as a legitimate vegetable, i have to admit. they're something that flavors other things. but these were so good we ate them all. p.s. i do have a pic of the boy, it's here, if you're interested. sorry about the offensive gesture, it's just that, well, he's spent his whole life here in south philadelphia. ok i'm not sorry. i think it's funny.

FWIW, they sell the despana morcilla at dibrunos on chestnut.