mrbigjas

you know what i always wonder about those things? at 210,000 BTU/hr, how fast does it rip through a tank of propane? i mean, i know stir frying is only done for a few minutes at a time, but holy moly....

nice! do us proud, sandy!

i've had to mostly stop buying from them--the last several times i've bought milk it's gone bad before its printed expiration date. i mean, i take it home and three or four days later it's all funky. and not that long ago i got a bottle that was bad when i got it home. i don't know if it's the lack of ultra-pasteurization you mention, or if their fridge is on its last legs or what, but stuff from there just doesn't last all that long. i mean, i know, it's dairy, it's not supposed to last that long. but their product seems to go bad especially quickly. here's another reason i noticed this: pequea valley yogurt. for some reason their black cherry flavor goes bad much more quickly than the other flavors. i don't know why it is, but you have to get it pretty fresh. last time we looked for it at LCD, we had a problem finding one that didn't already have a puffed up lid. i mean, there were 10 of them right there on the shelf, with the lid all puffed up. it doesn't make me confident to buy raw goat milk there. i still buy their buttermilk though. since it's already cultured, buttermilk especially lasts a good long time before it goes bad.

we are! i can't seem to stop myself this month though. tonight, i also made saltimboca. i made it with pork though. i stopped by the always great dibruno bros for cacio di roma, but they only had a sicilian cacio--well, no problem, whatever, good enough for spaghetti cacio e pepe. this dish, despite its simplicity, isn't easy to make--it's hard to get the consistency right, so the cheese doesn't clump up (it did for me tonight). but like amatriciana, it's also one of those dishes that's more than the sum of its parts. it's just cheese and pepper and pasta with a little pasta water, after all. how does it end up so damn good? i can't seem to bring myself to call them contorni, but vegetables were broccoli rabe sauteed with garlic and pepper, and i had some leftover grilled asparagus from the other night, so i turned it into asparagus al forno, from http://www.deliciousitaly.com/Laziorecipes.htm , which is a page i found on the web. you know i know it sounds kinda lame, but kevin's project last year, and this topic so far this year have made me realize that you know, really every italian cookbook should have a regional recipe index. that would save me the trouble of reading the intro and description of every recipe, hoping that the author will mention where it's from...

i did use bucatini, or perciatelli, as dececco calls it. i don't know the difference, if there is indeed one at all. i have to admit that i think that wrestling with al dente bucatini is part of the fun of the dish, to tell the truth. i have made it with other pasta and it wasn't the same. i'm not much of a purist, but i know what i like. as far as wine from lazio, since there's not much of it around that i notice (and since it's not a DOCG it's hard for me to tell what is what) the last two nights instead of frascati or whatever i drank.... i'm almost ashamed to admit it.... really cheap vinho verde. now i'll tell one quick story from my visit to rome, which i have probably told before: we were in a place called da oio a casa, which is right on that main road leading into testacchio... via galvani? it's solid and delicious roman classics, inexpensive, with a heapin helping of offal available at any given time. anyway, the staff was nice enough, but barely spoke english, and my italian is--well, calling it rudimentary would be a vast overstatement. so i had pasta e fagioli, which to this day is the best version of this i've ever had. and then a bowl of oxtails. now, i wasn't sure about roman manners, so i was picking away at my oxtails with a knife and fork, when the waitress came up to me and said OSSTALS... EETZ... WIDAAAANZA. i didn't understand. she repeated OSSTALS... EETZ... WIDAAANZA. after a third or fourth time, i realized she was saying that oxtails you eat with your hands. ok that story is slightly funnier in person. that was a great meal. as an aside, in that restaurant they had a clock on the wall, in the shape of a smiling chef. and on his hat was the clock, and it said specialità della casa on the clock.... and his pants were around his ankles, and his cock'n'balls were the pendulum for the clock. and i've been wishing for that clock to hang in my kitchen ever since. the end.

the roman theme continued last night with bucatini all'amatriciana. why is that dish so damn good? it's only five ingredents (i use onions, guanciale, tomatoes and hot pepper, with pecorino).

yeah, i think next time i'm going to make the polenta drier to start with. i poured it into a loaf pan thinking i was going to do something else with it (namely, fried cornmeal mush, as we call it up here in yankee territory), but when this idea came up yesterday it seemed too good to pass up. so i sliced it, then used a biscuit cutter to make the rounds, but there was a lot left over, so i re-shaped and re-cut, and things got a little sloppy. not too bad though. the thing about the batter is that since you're doing flour-egg-fry, all there really is to the coating is fried egg--the flour just helps it stick to the polenta. and it's hard to make just egg fry up crisp. what i might do next time is just take it one more step and do flour-egg-flour-fry, or even... hm.... since it's polenta anyway, how about flour-egg-cornmeal-fry? because the other thing is that since it's just dipped in egg, it's kinda oily--egg doesn't instantly harden and provide that barrier that a batter does when it hits the oil. as a followup, contrary to common wisdom and like most battered-fried foods, these hold and reheat really well in an oven. in fact, i heated them for lunch today on a paper towel and some more oil seeped out of them and they got crisper and even better, i think.

why thank you! they were tasty. i made them with leftover polenta from last night. of course i'd poured it in a loaf pan rather than a sheet pan so i had to slice it longways to make the things--all things considered they were definitely worth the effort of deep-frying. but next time i'm going nontraditional and hooking up a more solid batter, i think.

well, that book did indeed have it, so i made it tonight: there they are in the front, obviously. they were pretty good. but that flour-egg coating has never really satisfied me, the several times i've used it, including once for those sandwiches that are battered/fried buffalo mozzarella in bread. it's like, for things like this i always want something with more tooth to it. sure, the little eggy strands that get all crisp are good, but they don't provide quite enough structure to hold together the insanely hot polenta. (aside: what IS it with cornmeal's heat capacity? that stuff stays so hot, for so long...) it's almost like, if i could mix the egg and flour to make more of a batter, things would get crisper and be easier to handle. there's also the possibility that my polenta was a little softer than it should be--i tend to make it just a little runny when i make it. it sets up pretty well as it cools, but not super hard. but boy, that combination of really hot, rich mushy polenta, with a fry batter, and then that sharp, salty filling is really a great combo. other dishes were: the fennel with garlic, anchovies and sambuca that we've all made a hundred times and can never get enough of, from mario's roman jewish cooking show, in the blue dish in the back. the other plate is grilled beef with arugula--this was a dish we had the first night we were in rome a few years ago, at a restaurant called pommodoro in san lorenzo. just a plate of relatively plain grilled beef strips (i used sliced flank steak, marinated in olive oil and some rosemary), with simply dressed arugula on top of it. that night was a great night for me, because i got a dish of spaghetti carbonara, and it tasted just like what i made at home. so that first night in rome, i knew that i was on the right track with how i was thinking about cooking this stuff.

will do--i'm going to have to check and see if the book i have (simple italian cooking, i think) has them in there, or if they might be on food network's website--i don't have that mario book. thanks!

excellent. i just may do something like that tonight.

can you tell me a little more about these? i have some leftover polenta at home* and they sound damn good... *ok it's cheese grits, but i screwed it up by putting in way too little cheese, so you can't even taste it, and also i used some fancy italian white polenta by accident instead of grits--i had a confusing evening last night

It wasn't open the last saturday I tried to go... noon-ish a couple weeks ago. ← that's an outrage!

you guys know john's is open on saturdays nowadays, right? i mean all this talk of getting there when it's open and whatnot--it's not as difficult as it used to be...

sounds like a good time. the $7 a pound thing is intriguing--i always thought all those places were AYCE only...

we went tonight and i'm not sure if my serving was skimpy or not. but the combination of seville orange sorbetto and chevre gelato was fantastic. although really all the flavors i had tonight (pineapple sage, anise, mint, hibiscus) were deeeelish. this was the 20th st store.

Wow, thanks for the tip! I've been looking for new Chairman's Selections periodically over the past week and noticed the Kaiken Malbec was added back to the list tonight while it hadn't been there all week. I tried to buy 4 bottles for store delivery and the site would only let me order 3. The last bottle was listed as "unavailable" and had to be removed from my cart as it couldn't be backordered. Did I get the last 3 bottles? If so, I really lucked out as I didn't get a bottle when they were in stock. Anything under $10 that's a good value flies off the shelves at the 12th and Chestnut store... ← true--it tends to fly off the shelves noticeably slower at the delaware & snyder store, if that's any help.

marrowy! awwwww. i love love love babelfish translations of recipes, esp. because they use the infinitive for all the verbs. that's interesting, marrowy. i hadn't thought of it like that but i guess that is the translation of the word, isn't it? sorry, i shoulda translated that link i posted; we coulda saved a lot of effort.

yeah, what christine007 said. as long as your pots are kinda big, herbs just don't care that much (well, except for tarragon, which is kinda finicky). i've been growing them in pots for several years now, and lemme tell ya that being able to get your own free herbs instead of paying insane amounts for them in the store is totally worth whatever trouble it is to grow them--which, since it's hardly any trouble, is even more worthwhile. this year thyme, chives, mint, rosemary all survived. parsley and cilantro you have to replant every year anyway if you're growing in pots. other things i've noticed: thyme and mint will both take over every inch of space you give them, so they'll probably need their own pots. rumor has it that mint can get potbound and die, but that hasn't happened to mine yet and i don't have it in a big pot. basil is a little more touchy than some others, but on the bright side it grows fast and is an annual anyway, so if it dies just start over. tarragon can grow kind of oddly, not appearing to do anything for a while, and then taking off, and then dying just as quickly and mysteriously. i don't get it. oregano and marjoram are both relatively trouble free. chives are easy and will come back year after year as long as your winter isn't too brutal. since i've ascertained for sure that tomatoes just won't grow right on my deck, i have several large pots available, which i'll be filling with yet more herbs this year.

ok i've got a question: how much smoke billows out of the thing as you use it? you probably couldn't tell from when you were down here, but i live in a tiny rowhouse with a tiny deck for a backyard, in a crowded city. if it contains the smoke pretty well, there could be one in my future, but if it's pouring out smoke all day it's not going to work... ← I'm not sure how to answer that question. It was windy most of the days I was smoking, so I probably think that there's less coming out than usual. It definitely leaks out of the connection between the smoke box and the main unit, and the damper on top leaks a tiny bit. But I certainly wouldn't say that it's "pouring" out. Having said that, I peeked quite a bit, and it billows when you open the door. That's all to say: I think I'd be pissed if I lived above you. Sorry, man. My condolences. ← hmm... luckily no one lives above me. your answer is inspiring me to look into this.

I don't know if they're bottling or canning their products yet. Our CGJ (Chef Jose Garces) IPA is from Sly Fox and as soon as they bottle it, we'll be selling it in our retail department in the bar for sure. Sly Fox makes some really good beer. In fact, I don't think there's a bad one in their whole product line. ← you got that right. i gotta get out to their brewpub one of these days. i don't know if they're for sale yet, but they definitely had the canned stuff at the beer day up at the penn museum a couple weeks ago.

i'm waiting for them sly fox cans to show up at stone's, where i usually get my beer. good for tailgating...

googling moelleux turned up this: http://www.chocoholic.free.fr/hum_m04.htm it's in french, but from my limited comprehension it does look like a chocolate nearly-flourless cake or something. the pastry and baking forum folks i'm sure could tell you more, or really babelfish might translate well enough to get you started at least...

update: yesterday at the park regular hot dogs were nowhere to be found, at least in the upper levels (read: crappy seats) where we sit. instead, there were 'all beef hot dogs' for $3.25 (used to be $2.75 for dogs) at all the stands. i got one, and it was good! while, generally speaking, i prefer hot dogs made of pork products--or a mixture of pork and beef, or whatever is generally used in 'regular' hot dogs--the dogs at the park last year were so bad that this is a definite improvement.

kevin, dibruno bros. here in philadelphia carries it. i think it's the same niman ranch guanciale that everyone carries, but the key is they have it in stock at any given time. i don't see it on their website www.dibruno.com, but i know they have it in the case--maybe you could call and order?