Thanks for the Crepes

Dear rotuts, You know I love you, and MC, but I just have to disagree with you here. Mr. Wells was doing his professionally remunerated job while dining at Per Se, and he was not free to just walk out. In order to turn in the copy he was being paid to do, he had to endure less than wonderful experiences (multiple) to their end. Also, he said some of the dishes were great, and what one would expect at that price point. I have never been a professional reviewer of anything, but I enjoy movies, and I have contributed a few hundred amateur reviews of them on IMDB. Mostly for little known things, without many other reviews, and almost exclusively positive. I found out that if you want to generate yourself a whole lot of hate mail, all you have to do is turn in a single negative review for a hugely popular movie that you couldn't watch all the way through, because you found it repulsive and a waste of time. Well no one likes to get hate mail, so I tried to watch said movie again, forcing myself to go further than last time. Still no go. I was hoping I could get to a point that it would be worth my time, and I could add an updated review, and maybe mitigate my reputation with some of the hate mail senders. Such was not to be, but if I had been a professional reviewer, I would have been doomed to slog along to the end credits. I can also understand why people are outraged that someone dares to review something that they haven't fully experienced. Maybe that movie redeemed itself by the end? I will probably never know, but, if I was being paid to watch it and offer an opinion, I would have no choice. Pete Wells would have gotten a stack of hate mail that would dwarf mine over the movie review, and repercussions from his employer if he had walked out. He might be a glorified wage slave, but still had to do his job. See?

Yes, Mekelburg's. I wish I could go. Here. And here. Also here, and here's a Grub Street report on their amazing take on a stuffed potato! I just had to look at all 261 photos on the Yelp link, and now I'm wresting with myself to not eat something I do not need that would not be as good anyway. Man, I really wish I could go!

Watermelon is delicious, refreshing, especially on a hot summer day, and very rich per calorie in Vitamins A and C. Not so much in everything else, but I choose to believe in its superfood properties too.

I have had good luck by seasoning non-stick coated metal bakeware with a very thin coat of oil in a hot oven, as you would with cast iron. The polymerized oil sort of "welds" or melds with the coating, and it lasts much longer. Maybe it doesn't look as pretty to some observers, but, I'll take durable utility over pretty in my bakeware and other kitchen equipment any day. I get best results by just cooking on it for a while until I start spotting a little deterioration in the coating. It's too slick at first to hold onto the seasoning oil. By the time you see any degradation, it probably has microscopic imperfections that will hold the oil, and allow you to build your protective coating in several applications and baking. Once you do, the pan is both more durable and non-stick than the original coating. I even use my WearEver sheets under the broiler without fear of damage after this treatment, and they are very easy to clean up after a soak. Of course, I don't put them in the dishwasher.

Just because one's eyes motivate one to put it on the plate does not mandate that it all must be eaten in one sitting. We frequently have leftovers, which rarely get wasted. We both ate a lot more when we were younger, but have been eating on a pound of ground beef cooked up with Mexican treatment for two days for dinner, and the husband got a lunch out of it as well. Meat goes a really long way sometimes in Mexican applications, supplemented with lots of veggies, cheese, and tonight's reprise included some very ripe mango (with a very nice low-salt chili powder from Dollar General of all places) and (leftover) chickpea salad sides. I'm getting a little tired of looking at the leftover beef mixture, so I think I will mix the remaining 4 ounces or so up with some chili con carne fixin's, including fresh garden tomatoes, and serve it over spaghetti for our next dinner to provide some variety.

Does anyone know if this kudzu is the same as this one? We have kudzu vines all over the southern US, but I have never heard of anyone eating the roots.

Mexican night at my house. My husband had a beef burrito with refried beans and cheese, and I had a couple of tostadas. I cooked up the ground chuck with diced onion, jalapenos, chili powder, Goya Adobo, and black pepper. There was grated colby jack cheese, shredded iceberg, thinly sliced garden cherry tomatoes, and Daisy sour cream. I briefly grilled a large flour tortilla for him, spread a little hot refried beans down the center, and the rest of the filling was just the hot seasoned ground beef topped with cheese, the way he likes it, with a small salad of shredded lettuce, tomato, cheese and sour cream, topped with a sprinkle of more of the mild chili powder. He also had a side of beans topped with the co-jack. My first tostada was the beef mixture piled on top of an oven heated, commercial thin corn tostada, then topped with lettuce, and tomato. For the second one, I heated another tostada shell, and served it with a dish of beans and cheese and a salad of lettuce, tomato and sour cream with a sprinkle of chili powder also on the side. Then I build bites, as I'm ready to eat them, because the tostada stays crisper and the lettuce doesn't wilt that way. As usual, my beans had a healthy dose of Taco Bell hot sauce under the melted cheese.

@huiray, thanks for the link. It was a very interesting read. When @catdaddyreferred to it as a rabbit hole, I thought he was referring only to the length of the article. Then I read the part where Pete Wells had a better time at Senor Frog's than at Per Se, so of course I had to find out more about Senor Frog's. It turns out there's one where I could theoretically go, in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. After reading the New Yorker article, viewing all 200 photos on the Yelp site, and reading some reviews there, as well as elsewhere for that Senor Frog's location, I agree that it certainly qualifies as a deep rabbit hole. Senor Frog's only has 2-1/2 stars out of 5 on Yelp for the Myrtle Beach restaurant. People who went there to enjoy good food hate it, and people who went there to drink, party and dance with their own party of good company love it. Not for me, but super interesting that Pete Wells who describes his most memorable spring break as holing up in a hotel room with a good book (in German, no less) loved it so much.

Yes! I love grilled zucchini, crookneck squash, eggplant, onion, peppers, corn, stone fruits, and whatever else I have on hand that sounds like it might be good grilled when I have it fired up for meats.

I hope that deep fryer or wok is a lot easier to clean than I am imagining it to be. I can't see all the sugar staying put without coming loose into the oil. That snack looks wonderful, though.

He He. Google image search (lame as always, but with such amazing promise!) identified the first image by the OP correctly as "root vegetable", and the second image as "rock". So fossil is not so far off.

I do love a mystery. I could not find an exact match. The taro I am familiar with has more pronounced circular belts around it and it has more coarse hairs coming out. @mudbug's photos strike me as sweet potatoes, of which I am so proud we grow so many of here in my home state. Come to find out in my research, that the whole USA produces only 1 million tonnes of the world crop, with China producing a completely overwhelming 81.7 million tonnes! Knowledge is always good, but sometimes very humbling, which is also probably good once one adjusts. Sweet potatoes come in many skin and flesh colors, which may or may not match in the same tuber. Here's a link to one that has a picture that looks maybe like mudbug's images except, the one in the link is fresher and not as dried out. Here's another link from the same site with an image of a baked white sweet potato where the author says something about this variety being more perishable than other sweet potatoes. I will be interested to see if a definitive answer is ever arrived at.

This was a snack from a while back. When, I believe @sartoric started the toasties craze here, I put English muffins on my grocery list. The next time I got to the store (not easy because I no longer have a car) I bought English muffins. I bought the store brand, which is usually just fine, and 1/4 the price of Thomas'. Well by the time I had run through some of the other ingredients I thought were more perishable, and got around to the refrigerated package of muffins, they had molded. They were still three weeks away from the expiration date. Then, a month or so later, Thomas' were on sale 2 for 1. I'd been reluctant to buy more store brand, because when a factory has a problem like that, it's usually not isolated to just one package. Okay. I can pay $2.50 for less than a pound of bread product but not $5.00. I combined my Marcella inspired roasted tomatoes with the English muffins for toasties or ghetto pizza, and this was divine. It took a while, but when my long coveted toasties actually materialized in my kitchen they were worth the wait. I coated a pie tin with just enough EVOO to coat the bottom. Sliced in ripe, sweet garden tomatoes, sprinkled with garlic powder, kosher salt, fragrant black pepper, and dried oregano, then drizzled with a little more EVOO. Put the tin into a 400 F/204 C oven for ten minutes, flip slices, let roast another ten minutes. By this time, the excess water had evaporated, concentrated the flavor in the tomatoes, and now there was tomato infused oil in which to cook my toasties/ghetto pizza. I had split the muffin carefully with a fork, put slices of fresh mozzarella on top, then the beautiful roasted tomato slices, then some thin slices of white onion and jalapeno pepper. I highly recommend roasting and seasoning the tomatoes before adding them to your toasties. It takes a while to toast the muffins up, melt the cheese under the veggies and cook the raw slices of pepper and onion even in a hot oven. I was too impatient to remember how long, but it was longer than I wanted. I could not get these out of my mind, and kept trying to make it actually happen. I even contemplated making my own English muffins, but I seem to be yeast bread challenged. When the stars finally aligned, it was a snack well worth waiting over a month for.

It's not that hard to make great tacos. It is hard to get way too much money for them, but that certainly didn't have anything to do with the failure of the hyped chef's restaurant. If you want to "elevate" cheap, delicious street fare to "haute cusine" (read overpriced food) you had better bring your A-game, and then some, I think. Some folks like this concept, and more power to 'em. Me, I'm sticking with the wealth of authentic Mexican, Salvadoran, Ecuadorean, Peruvian, Korean, Thai, Chinese, Indian and other cuisines restaurants run by people from there, and priced reasonably, that are thankfully available right in my neighborhood. We have more expensive versions here too for people with more money than sense, and I hope they enjoy the restaurants, and I'm glad the restaurateurs can make a living too. Some do not perceive value in an inexpensive product. I was reading the other day about the history of Tater Tots. Ore Ida had to raise the price of their offering made from scrap and byproduct of processing their french fries before it became popular. I'm not drinking that Kool-Aid.

Now that is an understatement! They are amazing in the thread itself. Do yourself a favor, and pop some of them out into another tab. (Right click, Open in another tab) I had to scroll around some to see all of the larger images, but when I did, I was treated to a view of the whale in both the head and tail shots where I could smell the sea, hear the sea birds and spray, and felt like I was swimming way too close. The tail shot detail in the larger images reveals the vertebrae and a crop of barnacles growing on the fluke on the right side of the picture, which makes it the whale's left one, I think. When I popped out the taco truck photo to read the menu, I could. It impressed me as rather expensive, but I guess that's normal for hot food right on the beach. The food depicted looked great. I would have gone for the Mexican street corn, yum! I got a bonus on the food truck photo, too. The guy with the baby is wearing swim trunks with some really interesting art. The giraffe's heads and torsos are depicted in the bottom cobalt blue color, and the long legs in the top aqua color. All the dishes I tried pop out equally successfully, with such detail that you feel you are at the table eating them. Thanks for sharing, and I am in awe of your photography skills, @liamsaunt. Please stay safe in Hermine. It killed another person here out at our coast, I found out this morning. I hope the storm loses strength and just dumps a bunch of much needed rain up that way without any damage, flooding or storm surge.

@ElsieD, Thank you so much for allowing us to tag along on your on your amazing vacation to Newfoundland. Your time and effort is appreciated!

@savvysearch, That would be a no from me on soaking your candied fruit. If it has been properly candied and stored, it will already have enough moisture content. All you will do is wash out the sugar used to preserve it, I think. Also, if you use the commercial type with added artificial colors, you'll wash that color out too. It would still be edible, but probably disappointing in appearance and/or taste. That said, I have soaked some crystallized ginger I kept a bit too long, and it dried out, and then compensated for the washed out sugar. That is not the ideal, though. I was just salvaging an ingredient from my mistake. YMMV, and there are many more talented and experienced bakers on this site, than I am. I hope they will chime in.

@huiray, you are a lucky ducky in the vast selection of food ingredients you have available in your area, and take the effort to seek out, as I have said before.

Here's what "The Joy of Cooking" has to say about the oxalic acid in garden sorrel: "It is wonderful in salads, but use it discreetly, both because the flavor can overwhelm and because its concentration of oxalic acid can be mildly toxic in large doses." So many good-tasting plants going by the name of sorrel!

Is this the plant you are growing? This is the one I was talking about, wood sorrel. Two very different plants, I think. Interesting that so many different plants are called sorrel and they all seem to have a sour taste. I have never seen any type of sorrel for sale either.

Unfortunately, I have personal experience with wrecking my electric 1970's GE oven's thermostat by trying to get some heat in the house when the furnace went out one winter. I don't mean 25 or 50 degrees off by an oven thermometer. I mean, kaput! Once I inadvertently burned out the t-stat, I could turn the oven to bake or broil, set the temperature selector wherever I chose, and the oven would run wide open without cycling off until you cut its power by turning the selector to the OFF position. Great for home-baked pizza, not so much for anything else. If you must heat with an electric oven, do so only with the door closed until the oven comes to temp, then turn the oven off, open the door, until most of the heat has dissipated. Then you can repeat the process until the oven comes back to temp with the door closed, off, open, etc. I used the broken oven like this with a timer, and oven thermometer and manually shutting it on and off for several years, until the lower heating element burned out too, leaving only the range top and broiler elements working. The lower element's demise may have been hastened by using it for heating, but the thermostat's definitely was. I don't know if a gas stove's t-stat is vulnerable to this abuse, but personally, I wouldn't try it. I have never been so glad to get something fixed in my life! I sure wish I had seen this thread before I killed my t-stat.

I have grown this plant as Moss Rose, a floral ornamental, and seen a sketched rendition of it in "The Joy of Cooking" under salad greens. It really seems to thrive in hot, dry weather and well-drained soil, which we are not known for in this area with a lot of clay. I have seen in growing in improved soil, and especially raised beds here. I will recognize the weed version now, and try it next time I come across some. Thanks, Wayne. Some think I'm crazy for picking and eating wood sorrel (oxalis) which is considered a weed here too. I like it though. I can see it pairing well with seafood for its bright, sour flavor. This plant is very common here.

I slow braised a chuck roast from partially frozen with slivered onion, a can of cream of celery soup, a Knorr caldo de res cube, and half a cup boiling water all day in my 1982 Rival crockpot. At about 3:00 PM, I added lots of fresh, rough-chopped carrots and celery. Then about an hour before we ate, I added a little dried thyme, lots of dried parsley, and some black pepper. It didn't need any more salt. I left the potatoes I usually include out, because I planned to serve leftover scalloped potatoes, but all we wanted was the pot roast, veggies and some toasted English muffins with butter.

I'm no wine expert either salted cooking or not, but I know there are some people around here who might be able to help if they saw your post, so BUMP.

I made a blueberry coffeecake in an 8 x 8" (20.32 cm x same) with a whole pint of blueberries in it. I've made this coffeecake before, but didn't like it quite as well this time. Instead of a streusel topping, sometimes I like to use lightly sweetened cream cheese topping. I guess, in the past I just stirred a little sugar into a block of cream cheese. This time I whipped an egg and combined it with the cream cheese and a little sugar for the topping, like cheesecake batter. It's still fine, but the cheesecake batter sort of melded into the cake batter, so there's no real texture difference, like the prior versions I've made. I like biting into that tangy, contrasting blob of cream cheese like the way I was making it before. It's a lot like blueberry cheese danish in the no egg version, and not so much in this one. The egg batter pours over the cake and the eggless version gets dolloped on top. These berries came from Michigan, but I threw the container out and can't remember the town. Probably too late for local NC blueberries.