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Oh, I agree, it's definitely a high-quality product, but I really wouldn't expect low-quality food products to do very well in Malaysia, anyway.

it is a souring agent--and a little goes a long way. it is typically added at the end of cooking--often off-heat. It's also sometimes part of a tarka (infusion of ingredients in oil), fried up before the bigger items of a dish are put in. One of the nice things about amchoor is that it doesn't add liquid like lemon juice does, so if you want a dry curry or something, amchoor may work better than lemon juice.

In one of Madhur Jaffrey's cookbooks, there's a delicious pumpkin dish which I used to cook every fall for my parents in the days when my father could still eat foods with a lot of potassium in them. I usually substituted calabash (calabaza), which I probably like better than pumpkin. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, it's a sweet squash with black skin and orange pulp, pretty similar to a pumpkin but smaller. I've tried using acorn squash for the dish, and it tasted good, but I found it hell to peel because of its pointed shape!

Oh, one other thought, Sinclair: If you change a dessert slightly and a customer doesn't notice it and orders it, you could get some useful feedback: (1) The customer could complain s/he liked the dessert better the other way (2) S/he could say it's better the new way (3) S/he could say s/he noticed the change and liked it both ways

I vote for simplicity in naming, too. I really don't want a dessert to have some fancy name I don't understand; the only thing I really care about is how it tastes (and a nice visual presentation is a good bonus). I don't particularly like the "Study in x" title for desserts. If I want a study, I look for drawings an artist did in preparation for a painting or sculpture or open my etude books. When I'm in a restaurant, I want a fully realized dessert, and if you want an opinion on something you're studying, please offer a small taste as a freebie and ask for feedback. I realize it doesn't always work that way, and specials are sometimes new desserts the pastry chef is still working on, but "Study in..." just would seem to me to call attention to the dessert being a work in progress, rather than something you've mastered. So by all means, serve your experiments but don't call them experiments, by any other name. Just my 2 cents, and you know those ain't worth much nowadays.

Mongo, you're doing a great job with the photos. Stop dissing yourself.

LOL, you're in rare form today, Steven.

Me too, as a matter of fact, and it was Polish food from Teresa's.

I think of North Indian and South Indian food. I think of Madrasi and Malayali vegetarian food - masala dosas, idli, utthapams, aviyal, and in part curry leaves. I think of kebabs, tandoori meats, all kinds of breads - chapatti, naan, kulcha, pooris. I think of brinjal curries. I think of kulfi, ras malai, gulab jamun, that delicious sweet yogurt I get at the Bangladeshi store. I think of the feast of wedding food I had years ago in Srinagar, the fabulous vegetarian breakfast I had in Madras Woodlands in Delhi. I think of biryani and the Restoran Biryani, a middling but hearty establishment once operated by Indian Muslims in Kuala Terengganu, Malaysia. I think of delicious, un-mucusy okra dishes. I think of oil - especially mustard oil. I think of lassi and masala chai. I think of firni at the Karachi Rice Shop, the defunct restaurant that was on 46 St., the son of whose owner dated my mother once upon a time. Above all, I think of wonderful blends of spices, as reflected in the delicious smells in Indian stores and in well-made Indian dishes at any level of luxury and elaborateness from the humblest street food to the royal dishes with silver and gold foil on them as I used to get at Bangles Restaurant in Kuala Lumpur in the 1970s.

You'd be shocked to be served that in a restaurant, though, wouldn't you?

Lucy, you can see a picture of curry leaves here. Curry leaves are delicious and used in lots of South Indian dishes.

In many cases, I think that people can mythologize stuff immediately, for that matter, but I'm thinking of non-food examples, so I won't elaborate on them.

Maggi Mee served in a restaurant? Shocking! That's an instant product to use at home as a shortcut! It would be like an American restaurant using Rice-A-Roni or something. Malaysians often have sweet teeth. More than that, I couldn't say. I can't remember ever being served Milo in Malaysia, so it's not nearly as ubiquitous as tea with condensed milk, for example. I'll let someone else handle explaining Nasi Kandar.

I do. And, in agreement with cakewalk's post, it was always "having a barbecue," never "having barbecue." Another memory that goes way back into my childhood in the early 70s is the shop on the southeast corner of 86 St. and Broadway that I believe still has a big sign up saying "Bar-B-Q Rotisserie Chicken" or some very similar formulation of words.

Mongo: I don't know about anyone else, but I've found your last two posts LOL funny.

Well, many stereotypes exist because there is some degree of truth in them. So sure, there are some Northerners who have an anti-Southern prejudice, and vice versa. That's why I found Elie's remarks funny - because he's right that some people think the way he described. If any of you haven't seen footage of Bill Cosby's standup acts in the 60s, check it out some time. He cracked up audiences by making jokes about race relations. Those jokes were funny for much the same reasons - there was truth contained within the humor.

Jack Hitt's presentation was in fact hilarious! Those folks are really doing anthropology of food and food history. I called my mother (a well-known anthropologist, for those of you who don't know) and gave her some highlights which she found very interesting. By the way, I didn't react negatively to Lolis Elie's presentation. I thought he was very funny and I may have been wrong, but I didn't think his remarks about Northern stereotypes of Southerners were meant 100% seriously.

Barbacoa comes from Hispaniola, and yes, it was mentioned. Thanks for that excellent summary, Suzanne. A few remarks: Presumably South Carolina. He basically did say that, but he went further: He said that to Southerners, the idea of a New Yorker thinking he can make barbecue is laughable, because it's so much bound up with the identity of Southerners. I also thought his main point was that whites have tried to appropriate barbecue for themselves and downplay the importance of blacks in inventing barbecue or at least bringing it to the US. He talked about there always having been some black man on the other side of the tracks who made the great barbecue in a small town and that in days gone by, it was the blacks who cooked the barbecue for the whites while they stood around waiting - in the days of slavery and subsequently, when blacks were hired as servants. Robb Walsh essentially corroborated Elie's points by discussing the history of barbecue in Texas, as documentary evidence shows barbecue was apparently brought to East Texas by slaves on plantations. I thought Jack Hitt's remarks about barbecue and politics in South Carolina were absolutely fascinating! Yes, served in pockets of progressive areas of the state. Beloved by independent voters, who I believe he said were concentrated in the north of the state (he may have mentioned other places). Also, you left out that there is another Bessinger brother who owns a restaurant on the road from I believe Columbia to Savannah, who thinks it's awful that the other two brothers have aired their hatred for each other in public and is not a racist but just a businessman who wants to serve all customers - and Hitt thinks that brother's mustard sauce is actually the best of the Bessingers' sauces. I felt like he got off on a bunch of tangents, so I'm not sure the brisket and sausage were the only reasons you lost concentration. Don't get me wrong, the things he said weren't uninteresting, but I didn't feel like he had a coherent narrative like the other three, but I remember he said that people in Connecticut argue about which state has the best pizza (something Lolis Eric Elie said at first people didn't argue about), and talked about how "barbecue" means something very different in places like Southern California, where he grew up, than in the South - that is, barbecue is to grill hotdogs, hamburgers, maybe vegetables and chicken on one of those metal contraptions with charcoal and lighter fluid. He also mentioned that when people put "barbecue sauce" (including "liquid smoke") on hotdogs and hamburgers, that they are getting part of the experience of "real barbecue" at a remove, and he thought that might be good in helping them to appreciate real barbecue if they ever get the chance to try some. I guess that's one way of looking at it.

Did he name any names of countries? That would be interesting to know - like, did he go to Hong Kong, Thailand, India?

That is very gracious!

Thanks for the review, and I'm glad you had such a wonderful experience! I'm curious - did they give you a half glass of each wine?

It's interesting that in the US, I usually order medium rare, and I've always been satisfied with ordering a point in France. Go figure!

Well, I showed up today around 2:45 after practicing in the morning and early afternoon, and bought 20 cuepons. I then spoke with a number of different eGulleteers. I recognized Ellen right away, presumably because I had seen her picture in the Mongolia series, but didn't realize at first that we hadn't met previously. Nice to meet you, Ellen, and nice to meet everyone I already knew and those I hadn't met in person before; it was a good turnout of eGulleteers today. Ultimately, I took a seat for the fascinating panel discussion on Barbeculture. Once the panel discussion ended, I went over to 27th St. and got on line for ribs from the 17th St. stand. The ribs were warm, not cold, and I thought they tasted terrific! But what was really outstanding was their baked beans, a blend of several different types of beans, as has previously been described. They were spicy and vinegary, not too sweet. I could have stood to have twice as much of them. Having finished my portion of ribs, I got on line at Big Bob Gibson's, because by that time, Mitchell's had already run out. I wanted their hot sauce, but they were out of that and gave the mild sauce (by the way, thanks to the two eGulleteers who were ahead of me on line and got the cue for me - I forgot your monikers, but please identify yourself and claim credit). I actually thought the mild sauce had a nice bite and a little bit of it helped the pulled pork considerably. It was tasty but a fairly small portion. That said, two portions were enough for me, and I sold my remaining 6 cuepons to a woman who otherwise would have waited on line for nothing (the balance of 2 cuepons had been spent on water). Big Bob's cue also came with a portion of baked beans which were just kidney beans, I think (all the same kind of beans, anyway), and more like what I'm used to - worth eating but not particularly outstanding. I then hung out and listened to the set that Melvin Sparks' band played. Excellent blues band! In case no-one's mentioned it yet, the organizers seem to have learned a lot from yesterday, and had dividers up to keep the lines organized. Several but not all of the lines also had "end of the line" signs up, held there by members of the staff (17th St. didn't). What people told me was that they simply ran out of cuepons, not that they chose to stop selling them. Clearly, next year they will print more cuepons to meet the level of demand that they now know to expect. I think it's too bad they don't let people drink beer everywhere in the park for the duration of the block party, but I realize that New York has laws against drinking outside and suspended them in a particular area. It was a very fun occasion, and I expect I'll come back next year.

Another good thing to add to the sauce are mushrooms. I haven't cooked pasta sauce for some time, but I always included at least a whole ~8-oz. container of mushrooms in my sauce.

I think that the top level should be based on an absolute (I won't say "objective") standard, not a curve. If a restaurant like Bouley is sometimes mind-blowingly good and other times sort of mediocre, it shouldn't get 4 stars. To get 4 stars, a restaurant ought to be consistently mind-blowing - otherwise, Fat Guy's idea of a 5-star system becomes more appealing.