mrbigjas

they're at midnight.

wow, that's amazing. good stuff. what were the smelts stuffed with?

pizza not available in DC? sacrelidge! why just this weekend i was at the two amys eating a puttanesca pizza, and that other one with the salami on it. and some great pickled mackerel too. and it was insanely good. chinatown is always an option for dinner--for the last several years we've gone to vietnam palace. seeing that you're from arlington, though, maybe you get your fill of vietnamese food... after dinner, assuming you went to chinatown, you could walk down to penn's landing to see the fireworks, if you like that sort of thing. last year... or no wait, the year before, we did just that, eating at joe poon's restaurant (it's not there anymore), and then getting drinks at the dark horse before wandering out and watching the fireworks.

thanks gkg680, that was what i suspected. my theory was that even if the thing was overpriced, a $100 discount would make it worthwhile--but only if it was what i wanted. but i reckon i'll go back to the original plan of buying from one of those other sites, whether it's falk or mauviel or even matfer bourgeat. and go back to figuring out what else i should blow this money on at williams sonoma...

i got three things i didn't need and don't have room for: --mezzaluna --'the alligator' vegetable dicer --wms. sonoma 'entertaining' books for thanksgiving and xmas and one thing i wanted: --paula wolfert's southwest france book on the bright side, with the returns i'm now up to nearly $100 in credit at williams-sonoma, so i may get the copper saucepot i've been looking at...

Q: sam, do you (or anyone reading this thread) know if this 'heavy gauge' mauviel saucepan they're offering at wms-sonoma is a regular old 2mm version or a 2.5mm one? because of various returns over the last six months, i have about $100 in credit at williams-sonoma, which would bring the price down to $120. but i want to be sure i'm getting the heaviest gauge--since it's (hopefully) a once-in-a-lifetime purchase, i don't want to get anything but the best.

i got a copy of this book for christmas and i can't wait to get started... ok actually i'm going to have to because i have a container of crab that i have to use. but speaking conceptually i can't wait...

wow, excellent job. i've been thinking about savory french toast a lot lately, since i made those italian grilled cheese sandwiches in mario's book... i forget the name of them... mozzarella in carrozza? those scalloped potatoes were still the side for most dishes at nan when i was there just a couple of months ago...

i ended up being a successful wine merchant, with decent semillon and zinfandel vineyards, and 85 gold pieces. of course considering that that's 29 years later and i started with 80... hm, i just played again, and by being aggressive and blowing all my money in the beginning, combined with some luck i ended up a famous grape grower with two decent chardonnay vineyards, a decent semillon vineyard, respected cab and zin vineyards, and another starter cab vineyard. and 149 gold pieces. now that's more like it! the verdict is: if you have a lot of money you can do anything.

did you put a lid on it? i've done this in the past and strained and reboiled, and i'm not dead yet. that said, biologists use stock as a medium to grow bacterial cultures and whatnot, because it's so damn good at it. i think the lid would be the key difference for me. who knows what might have fallen in it otherwise?

when i was in barcelona earlier this year, we had crosnes and the waiter told us they were sunflower roots or shoots or something. actually that's how they were described on the menu as well... hmmm.

hmm... where does one buy falk culinaire? i'm not seeing as much of an online market for them as much as the mauviel, and i know i haven't seen them in the stores here in philadelphia. edit: nevermind, i was misspelling it--no 'e' on the end. i see some dude with an ebay store called 'belgium for you' is selling a three-piece set of the curved sauciers for $295... interesting. what i'd really like (because it's what i'm used to from the old aluminum pans i have) is a splayed or curved splayed saucepan, but they are only availaible up to 3 qt or so, and i really need* that extra 1/2 - 1 qt. *for certain values of 'need'--the same values that are making me 'need' copper cookware...

ok now i have a quick question. i'm in the market for the 3.7 qt 2.5mm stainless-lined copper saucepan. i really use this size of pan frequently for everything. now, i don't know either of those websites. but on that metro kitchen site they have it for $265.95 with lid here. on that second site they have what is ostensibly the same pan on this page for $154.77. now, i know the copper lids cost (and i don't actually care about having one). but they don't cost THAT much. so i must be missing something. what is it?

no date that i noticed, no. just that code. although you know, i'll look more closely when i get home. interesting about the bow st. distillery closing--it still says it on the new bottle, right above the PRODUCT OF IRELAND. i don't know that much about the history of the various irish whiskeys, so this is interesting...

SO... a year ago, maybe longer, my father in law gave me an unopened bottle of jameson he'd had sitting in his liquor cabinet for who knows how long. when i say who knows, i mean 20 years isn't out of the question at all. it might have been a gift and be younger than that, but there's an equal chance that it's even older. well, i said to myself, this'll be interesting--let's do a comparison. i mean, after all with big ol' mass produced blended whiskeys like this, part of the point of the way they do things is that the company's tasters blend various whiskeys so that it has the same flavor profile each year, right? well, i didn't get around to it until a couple of weeks ago. now, i like irish whiskey and drink it pretty often, but for some reason things just didn't work out before now. so my wife and i did a double blind tasting so i could see how things turned out. so here are the bottles: the older is on the right, perhaps obviously. what you can't see in this pic is that the old bottle is 86 proof, and the new is 80 proof. here's a shot of their tax label thingies--i don't know if the codes will give anyone an idea of how old the older bottle is; if for some reason someone knows how much they import or whatever: so here they are in the glasses: hmm.... i swear this wasn't all so blurry when i took them. they look pretty much the same. eh? anyway, the two were strikingly different. one had a very noticeable light pear aroma which dominated, with vanilla and other light fruity sweetness (actually i just went back and revisited, and the pear flavor is even more noticeable now that i'm tasting for it; almost to the elimination of anything else). the other had a much more medicinal peatiness to it, and had an alcoholic aroma which reminded me a little of grappa or something--that rubbing alcohol smell. i assumed, for some reason, that the rougher funkier one (B, above, in case it matters) would be the new one--i guess i figured if anything could happen in the bottle, things would mellow out and get sweeter and whatnot. anyway, i was wrong and it turns out it was the older one. i'm having another of the old ones right now and it's definitely harder going than what i think of when i order a jameson in a bar. which is interesting because when she has whiskey, my wife prefers bushmills because she thinks jameson is too medicinal and hotly alcoholic tasting. but comparing the new to the old, the new doesn't have a bit of those flavors, relatively. there's been a serious change in the flavor profile which i think can't entirely be attributed to the proof. so anyway, while i've had pretty much every jameson on the market right now, from the regular stuff to the 12, 15, 18 years, to the midleton very rare to the 1870 in the old school replica bottle, i don't remember one tasting like this. it's pretty interesting, and makes me wonder why and how things have changed. i'd like to taste an 86 proof jameson made nowadays. respectfully submitted, jas.

i'm right across the state from ya doin' the same thang... cheers.

they were full-sized. on saturday i mentioned this place to my parents, and they reminded me that the pizza place is actually called julio's, not gino's, despite the name of the dish. funny how memories work.

come on down and ask him about them. one of the fun things about sk is that shola is not secretive at all about techniques or ingredients, and he'll totally tell you how to make them yourself. at that point it's just a matter whether you have the mad skillz or not...

that's really a fantastic sandwich. the more i have it, the more i like it. a little horseradish makes it perfect.

hey, yeah, tostones have to be fried twice, right? i could do them as well!

in scenic lower bucks county, pennsylvania, where i grew up, there was a pizza place called gino's that made deep-fried calzones. but they called them ginocottis. and they certainly didn't have greens in them, but rather just cheese and sauce and whatever pizza topping you'd want. man that was good. a puff of fried dough, you crack it open and there's a puddle of 375-degree melted cheese and sauce inside... sure it wasn't 'authentic' italian, but it was tasty. (of course googling gino's only turns up my previous posts about that place here on eg...)

yeah! i was caught off guard by the number too. i said, do you have rye for a manhattan? and dude rattles off all the ryes they carry. they might have beam too; i could be misremembering--i know overholt, michters and rittenhouse were options. he makes a damn good drink, too. one note: the default is to shake the hell out of it, and i like things not quite as frothy and ice-chippy as a shaken drink usually is. but considering the fact that i was already ordering a rittenhouse manhattan perfect twist no cherry, i was feeling foppish enough without specifying the mixing method too...

thanks for all the replies. the reason i ask about how restaurants do it is that often we can take a tip from them as far as efficiency--if you can scale it down to a usable home technique, doing things the way restaurants do can really make your life easier (cf making and reducing stock). the nice thing about this one is that buying 10 lbs of potatoes costs about $2, and a big ol bottle of oil costs like $6, so for $8 i can have my answer. i just figured i'd check and see if anyone had done this already at home...

bumping this thread up to say we went over to southwark last night and had an excellent meal, and that everyone should go back if you haven't recently. we ate at the bar because when it's just the two of us we like to. and drinkwise, don't miss the yards spruce ale on tap, which is the best weird beer i've had in a long time. when i asked for a rye manhattan i was offered a choice of overholt, turkey, michters or rittenhouse..... awesome. small plates were especially notable. a plate of house-cured bass was pretty strongly fishy (i don't mean that at all in a 'not fresh' way, just in a 'not mild' way), and it came with an orange dill creme fraiche that was on the border of being too sweet and orangey--but when you put them together and added the red onion and capers and toasted black bread, it suddenly became much more than the sum of its parts: not fishy, not sweet, but crazy good. a beet salad went in a similar direction--star anise in the dressing pulled the beets and greens together into this sweet, earthy combination that was out of this world. when was the last time you said out of this world about beets? this really was. incidentally, the reason i realized that it was star anise was that a couple of bits of it were in the salad. i know some people would consider that a flaw, but i'm the kind of person who is happier to know how it was made than to worry about that. mains were a great fried quail--two quails fried in a fried chicken-esque coating, over root vegetables and chestnuts in a sweet-ish glaze/sauce. the quails were the whitest quail meat i've ever seen, cooked to a perfect medium, and truly excellent with a glass of that cotes du roussillon they've had there all three times i've been there. smoked bison short ribs didn't fare quite as well--maybe because of the lack of fat that beef short ribs have, they were not quite as richly falling apart tender as the beef version is, and were served with polenta that solidified pretty quickly. i like polenta either soft and runny or hardened and fried/grilled, so this wasn't my style. but also keep in mind that we were sitting at the bar and it was about 15 degrees outside, so that was hardly their fault. finished up with a plate of the butteriest butter cookies that ever buttered. if there's a recipe it's probably 'start with butter, add enough sugar to make them just a little sweet, and then add juuuuust enough flour and egg to hold everything together, and then, a little more butter and you're done.' great stuff, served with a tangy lemon curd that was intensely lemon peel flavored. anyway, the point is, the food was great, the owner and bartender were a pleasure to deal with, and as with so many places in town, i wish i could get back there more often.

apparently the ritz carlton has a fancy hot chocolate thing going on, although i hear they're closing it down or reducing the hours or something.... wait here's some info i found googling for it: http://www.phillyist.com/archives/2005/11/...carlton_coc.php