mrbigjas

what annoys me most of all is when reviewers get too cutesy and specific with their reviews. i read one last week that said it had a whiff of jamaica blue mountain coffee at the end. and another that specifically mentioned valrhona chocolate. another that mentioned spanish saddle leather. 'edible rice paddy' is probably my favorite of the nonsensical descriptors i've ever read, though. now yes, i know that coffees have different flavor profiles, and i know that chocolate makers have their own specific profiles as well. but do i believe that you can differentiate between jamaica blue mountain and kona coffees in the finishes of wines that you're tasting? i don't think so. and edible rice paddy doesn't even make grammatical sense.

ouch, yeah--this is going to be more trouble than the mother's day aspect, i bet.

thanks y'all. truth be told, from the descriptions i read, i was expecting the dough to be softer and thinner--really almost like a strudel or phyllo dough. it was good though. i think a trip to italy is in order for me.

yeah they have a ton of it at 19th & chestnut. as a side note about that store: i was told last week by one of the very nice ladies who works there that they're in the process of renovating that store, including putting in a climate controlled room and whatnot, like they have down on delaware ave. pretty cool! but i hope they can stay open during the process; my route home from work doesn't go by 12th street...

wow, i wish i could take pics as well as y'all... well, and that my meals turned out as well. i don't, and there were some issues with this meal, but in the interest of honesty i'll put some of it up anyway. so yeah, after a relatively meat-heavy weekend, i decided on a couple of vegetable dishes from liguria, all of which i found in the links on the first couple posts in this thread. here's the meal: in the front there is linguine with pesto. nothing more to say about that; it was linguine with pesto. i love it, i'd eat it every day if i could. i blended it this time, to a really smooth puree, so there wasn't the texture in there that you get from a food processor. tasted good. in the middle is a 'torta di asparagi' i found on that rusticocooking.com site. since it was the most interesting and successful of the three dishes tonight, here's another couple of pics: i put the top crust on it because i had the dough. making it, i realized that the crust isn't as thin as it should be, although it's very thin--i get the impression from the site that it should be almost paper thin. it tasted good--this is a really easy dough to deal with. over the years spent cooking for two, i've developed a pretty good sense of scaling things down to cook for two without too many leftovers, but i overestimated the dough for this one. in the back there is a dish which, if i'd taken a closeup, would qualify for the gallery of regrettable foods thread. it's from a cooking.com recipe (originally from the italian gourmet, whoever that book is by): 'genoese eggplant with eggs', in which you fry onions and eggplants in whole lot of olive oil, add tomatoes and cook for about 20 minutes till things break down some, and then take off the heat and mix with a beaten egg and herbs to make a sauce. so yeah, speaking of inaccurate scaling, i used one more egg than i should have, and it was mostly sauce. tasted good, since it's just a kind of ragout of tomatoes and eggplant and onion bound with egg, after all, but boy was it saucy. and looked horrible. anyway, this was a first step in a cuisine i'm not that familiar with, beyond focaccia and pesto. i bought some sage so i could make a fried herb recipe that was on one of the sites for an app, but i couldn't get to it with the other stuff. next time, maybe. also i have a bunch of chickpea flour, so i think i'll give farinata a try this month. actually i'm surprised no one has yet. for some reason, i'm not getting a feel for the meat/seafood dishes of the region, and i'm not getting a sense of what makes up a meal in the same way as i kind of 'get' some other regional italian cuisines. so i'm not sure about figuring out a menu of sorts to make. i think i need to update my italian cookbook collection, and do some more reading.... edited for like the fourth time to provide this link, which is interesting, if nearly impossible to read because of its formatting and switching between english and modern and older italian.... anyone gonna make this: ok really that's the last time i'm editing.

somebody get that stromboli some robitussin! edited for alternate joke: that's nothing, one time i saw a chef make a quiche with appendicitis!

you know, i'm so much happier when i don't read these things. i have to wonder why i just looked through it...

is that what that was? i kinda only glanced at it--it was really crowded when we went in, and the cart was pretty much empty when we left--and in my mind's eye it registered as pickles. i should totally have paid more attention.

went tonight. i like. seriously good stuff. the waitress appeared to barely speak english at the beginning of our meal, but at the end she was very pleasant, asking us if we liked everything and pointing out that americans don't often like spicy food. someday we as a country are going to shed that image. from what little i know of sichuan cuisine, it appears to have a pretty high incidence of offal-based dishes. therefore, i need to go back, and relatively soon, because the folks i was with tonight just weren't interested.

today was the rittenhouse row festival; i didn't see any farmer's market. but i did have a kobe slider from barclay prime, a lobster salad baguette from nineteen, and pork ginger chive potstickers from twenty manning.

i saw a show recently where dude was in a fancy restaurant (maybe per se?) and they had a deep fryer filled with clarified butter. now i'm no expert, but i think that's pretty much the right thing to do.

i recently had avocado gelato at capogiro. besides being fun to say, the avocado gives the gelato an even creamier texture, maybe because of the avocado's added fat content, or maybe it's my imagination. it's not that sweet, and very good in an odd way. knowing that avocados have lots of fat, some of it saturated, i've often thought that avocado oil would be great for frying, and wondered why people don't make oil out of them more often, especially the big watery florida kind. so i googled it, and it seems to be available, although not common.

last i heard it was because there was a shipping strike. i forget if it was the drivers or loaders or what...

gotcha. i have limited space, so a setup like this is mighty attractive to me, i have to admit. (edited to say: assuming it doesn't suck, that is)

i don't know, but i can't imagine it doesn't have vents. then it wouldn't work pretty much at all, would it? i need to see one in person, i think, before dropping that kind of coin.

what do the grilling folks think of this jam right here: brinkmann all-in-one seems like the ultimate convenience, serving as a gas or charcoal grill or smoker, or as a turkey or fish fryer or boiler, OR as a superpowered stir-fry implement. do any of you see any downside, besides that it's kind of expensive and there's no storage for the propane tank?

this is my experience as well, except it's more like every 2-3 years. i think i'm on my third rosemary plant since i moved into this house in 1999. i'm growing them in pots, though, so they're even more susceptible to being frozen.

some of us do, sometimes!

it's really a pretty easy one. being an easily-bored eater who is only cooking for two the vast majority of the time, i realized a few years ago that it's worth my time to make small amounts of things, even when making much more would be nearly the same effort. sure, it's about the same amount of work to make 3 lbs of short ribs as 1 lb, but i'll be sick of them before i'm done, so i'll just make less. and something this rich, especially--two of us split it and it was a great appetizer. it's just a chicken liver, but more importantly it's an excuse to try something out. next up: one duck leg confit. ok i'm kidding about that one.

been a while since anyone posted in this thread, eh? i'm always looking for something to do with a chicken liver when i buy a chicken. my wife doesn't really eat them, so usually i just fry them up in some clarified butter, flambee in cognac, and eat it as the chef's treat. so i'll tell you what i did this week: i made the duck liver flan with caramel vinegar sauce. but i made one flan, with one chicken liver. it's pretty easy; just divide everything in the recipe by five.... what? oh calm down, it was great. the sauce. my god, the sauce.

i haven't researched it lately, and unfortunately killed off a lot of my short term memory in college, so i can't remember off the top of my head, but if you search around the site, you'll see the things i'm talking about--acid sensitivity, cracking, inability to, say, attach a pasta maker or something, etc. the impression i've gotten from reading about all this stuff over the years is that they look great, but they're relatively high maintenance and really not the greatest choice for sheer utility.

today i was at a local bar that recently opened, that has fireslate for a bar material. i still like the feel of it, but here's a photo i took of it: can you tell someone didn't want the lemon in their drink? i didn't realize that basically it's a concrete-esque material, and should be avoided if you want to avoid the issues there are with concrete. i'm gonna take a pass on this stuff.

That's a long way to go for bacon, James! ← it's only three hours or so... but you're right. if i didn't have family up there and make relatively frequent trips, it might not be worth it. but one of the things about the country store is that they used to also house the post office in pennsdale, so they're pretty experienced at mail order. i'm tellin ya their hams are not to be missed. edit to say that besides, as lancastermike points out, there is a whole big state outside of center city... it's worth it to head up there, it's nice country.

my latest bacon is from the country store in scenic pennsdale, pa. the country store makes fantastic pork products of all kinds--the smell of a country store ham cooking is a very specific one, and immediately brings back the memory of my grandmother's house on a holiday afternoon. anyway, of course they also cure bacon. and their bacon is great--a little sweeter, more porky and less intensely smoky than some. their kielbasa is great too, and their sausage. i don't know how you'd classify the sausage they make up there--it's just, bulk sausage, not in links. kinda breakfast sausage. they also make hot dogs, and i'll report back on them.

all, i have a new candidate for roast pork sandwiches, which someone needs to check out: the inimitable chickie's. yesterday i was ordering up a pile of hoagies for my office and i noticed that they offer roast pork, in both hot and cold versions. so besides my chickies specials and tuna specials and veggie specials, i ordered up a cold roast pork hoagie, and it was delicious. i didn't order the hot version though, since i had to take it across town and i thought it wouldn't travel. but this deserves checking out by someone, wouldn't you say? they do offer very garlicky broccoli rabe.