Bill Klapp

Elyse: I use the recipe for banana ice cream out of Ben & Jerry's ice cream book, using the first "Basic" uncooked recipe for the base (I can post it tomorrow if need be; let me know) and adding nutmeg and cinnamon to taste (remembering that freezing the mixture is going to mute the flavor of the spices some). Then I take a small fistful of raisins, cover them with good rum, and boil them at top power in the microwave until the raisins absorb almost of the liquid (if all of the liquid is allowed to evaporate, it defeats the purpose, as the raisins will dry out and ultimately burn), then cool the raisins. (If you use the macerated raisins hot, the combination of the heat and the residual alcohol in the rum will melt your ice cream.) Freeze the ice cream mixture, and when it is almost done, add the raisins and keep freezing until the ice cram sets again. I will post the lavender stuff sometime in July when I get back from Italy.

Killer stuff. There are a number of lavender-based sorbetti and gelati in northern Italy. Maybe better is lavender creme brulee. I have recipes for both from the ristorante Flipot in Italy. Will post them when I get back. I make a lot of ice cream, gelati and sorbetti, and on the domestic side, the all-time favorite (as judged by my eaters) is banana rum raisin, the key being to boil the raisins in the rum to plump and soften them and fill them with the concentrated rum flavor, and also to cook the alcohol out (microwave works great, by the way). The raisins, after being thus softened first, take on a nice light crunch when frozen in the ice cream. Pinch of cinnamon, pinch of nutmeg, vanilla if you like, and you have a tropical delight.

Some pretty fanciful posts up there, Varmint. The key to me is to do whatever you can do with the best ingredients available here in NC. Cinghiale (wild boar) is a stretch, I'm afraid. Especially since there is a fair amount of bad wild boar, even in Italy. If you have anybody that can roll fresh pasta dough, I would suggest a Bolognese lasagne for the primo. Much easier to serve the masses. I can shoot you a recipe. This is not your tomato-ricotta-mozzarella-meat number, but rather besciamella (white sauce) and Bolognese ragu. Lighter than air, as Craig can no doubt attest, but filling enough! I also think that you might also consider seafood-stuffed stuffed zucchini blossoms (although fried probably won't work for a big group). I had enormous success lately with an interesting classic Piemontese secondo, pork braised in milk. Since we get great pork here, it would be a natural. You marinate pork loin or tenderloin ifor two or three days in dry white wine and red wine vinegar, then cook it in milk, rosemary and sage. The milk and pork drippings reduce to a subtle but exquisite sauce. And panna cotta for the dolce, certamente! Again, you can buy the Maple View Farms heavy cream, which is darn near up to Italian standards. Maybe with a little fresh berry puree, as local strawberries should be in. To take the strain off, you might also consider strawberries marinated in a little balsamico. And don't forget a small cheese course. Go to Capri tastes in Morrisville, too. The signora there may offer you inspiration, not to mention quality ingredients from the old country. She has whole frozen cakes and pastries from Turin, so I would not be shocked to find frozen cinghiale there. And I'm going to be in Italy while this feast is going on! (Not that you have invited me yet, but I'm sure that I must be high on your guest list!)

Fair point, Carema, but with one quibble: there are some retailers out there who try to shape customer tastes based upon what they have, not necessarily what is good. But I think my basic point still applies: find one or more reference-point palates you can trust. It need not be Parker or Tanzer.

Whew! I misread the title. I thought that it said "Varmint Exposed Himself!", in which case my inevitable response would necessarily have been, "AGAIN?"

Dear docsconz: Many approaches are possible, and in a perfect world, with far fewer wines, you would merely taste through them. Last time I checked, however, there were between 10,000-15,000 wines competing for your attention. It seems to me that the single most important factor is developing a track record with someone whose palate you can use as a baseline. Being a lawyer, in order to teach myself about wine in the first place and later, as a hobby, I created a spreadsheet which tracks the periodic evaluations of Robert Parker, Steve Tanzer, the Wine Spectator and Gambero Rosso (Italian wines only) for about 2,000 wines. (I once had 10,000 wines on the spreadsheet, but as I learned what I liked and what was truly good, whether I liked it or not, I winnowed down the list.) I also read the tasting notes of those sources. Over time, I was able to make sustainable generalizations about each of the sources (for instance, I find Tanzer to be the most conservative with the fewest blind spots, Parker likes huge, fruity wines but has blind spots for more subtle and difficult wines such as red burgundy and Brunello, WS is a team rather than a person, with inconsistent quality of evaluation, and GR often rewards effort rather than absolute quality, to name a few). Ultimately, it does not matter if you hate EVERY wine Parker praises, as long as he is sufficiently consistent in his views to allow you to sustain your dislikes. Certainly, if you develop a taste for rare and hard-to-find wines, such publications are essential to allow you to get a jump on the pack that will be hot on the trail of those wines. Beyond that, it is largely a matter of tasting wines and sorting out your favorites, with one important caveat: I know few people whose palates do not develop over time, so that the cheap, fruity wine that pleases you today may seem flat and one-dimensional five years from now after you have sampled a much better example of the same wine or a different wine which suits you better. And, of course, the immutable law of wine collecting is that the more complex wines you grow to appreciate are almost invariably more expensive!

Suvir: Thanks. The heat in the center is significantly hotter than on the floor of the oven, which is what allows the top to cook quickly without burning the bottom of the crust.

Suvir: I never received an answer to an old question, which is this: I do not have a tandoor, but I do have a wood-fired pizza oven, which gives me a super-hot terra cotta cooking surface. Do you think it will work for nan and other tandoori classics? If so, are there any issues I should be aware of? For instance, the oven generates a very dry heat which causes quick evaporation. A problem or a good thing vis a vis the tandoor? Thanks!

Funny, but obviously, it was dead on arrival...

Thanks, Peter. It seems to me that relatively few Americans "take up the search" because most live a lifestyle that, whatever its momentary pleasures, is inherently, albeit slowly, self-destructive. Of course, there are exceptions. There are Americans that eat, sleep and exercise properly and have plenty of time for family, friends, hobbies and interests. Unfortunately, most of those fall into one of two groups: "retired" or "independently wealthy"! We are an obsessive lot. It is not enough to jog, you must jog until you suffer incapacitating injuries from it. It is not enough to eat food that you like, you must "Hungry Man" and "Supersize" it. We are about good grades, the best jobs, the biggest raises, the grandest homes, the most expensive cars. We are about success, measured by outrageously wrong-headed standards. We are not about moderation, balance, perspective and appropriate prioritization at any cost. But I need to be done with this. At some point, it is no longer about food, and I believe that food could be part of the solution, rather than the part of the problem it is in America today!

Hmmmm...Is a bottle of '88 Champet more or less expensive than a Viagra prescription?

WARNING: This post deliberately chooses to ignore the upside (to the extent that the same exists) of the American way of eating. I am a child of semi-rural America of the 1950s. I had a classic Leave It to Beaver childhood. I can remember the taste of warm, unpasteurized farm-fresh milk. I can remember beef that tasted like, well, beef. I can remember climbing up in my grandfather's apple and sour cherry trees and eating myself sick. I can remember the tastes of stringbeans, peas, corn and tomatoes that were picked minutes before from my grandfather's garden. I can remember the taste of my grandmother's homemade yeast rolls fresh out of the oven and the sweet-sour tang of the farm butter I slathered on them. I can remember the taste of country ham on buttermilk biscuits hot out of my grandmother's oven, as well as the pinto beans and kale at Sunday dinner, seasoned with the hock from that ham. And I can remember a poor woman named Pop Bottle Annie (as in soda pop) who, to supplement her income from finding and redeeming soft-drink bottles for the deposits they yielded, picked 5-gallon buckets full of blackberries and raspberries in the woods and sold them door-to-door. I did not think any of that was all that special in the 1950s. As Joni Mitchell so aptly pointed out, "You don't know what you got 'til it's gone." In spades, as it turns out. Yet, until about five years ago, I was fine with my plight. My wife and I are both good cooks, and I am a relatively good shopper. We also learned to keep an eye out for the best new restaurants wherever we were living. I took up wine collecting as a hobby, and got a big kick out of wowing friends with successful wine-and-food pairings. Yes, overweight, underexercised and working too hard, but prosperous enough, all things considered. And then the freight train that is the American Dream suddenly seemed to me to run off the track. Serial killers sprouting up everywhere. Columbine and its progeny. The O.J. trial. The movie "Wall Street", which we did not know until several years later was one of the greatest works of non-fiction of the 20th century. Osama Bin-Laden. 9/11. Saddam Hussein. And so it goes. Surely, this state of affairs had been decades in coming, but it came home to roost with me all at once. I began looking hypercritically at many things American, and the closer I looked, the less I liked what I was seeing. I often wondered if at least a handful of Romans did not feel this way just before the collapse of the empire. And nowhere was the deterioration of the American way of life more evident than in its eating habits. Allow me a little Joycean stream of consciousness: TV dinners. MacDonald's. "Better" eating through chemistry, on vegetables and fruit and in livestock. Artificial flavors and colors. Mushy USDA prime-in-name-only beef in Cryovac plastic packaging to avoid losing an ounce of saleable weight. Fruits and vegetables from Florida and California on every supermarket shelf, picked unripe and either gassed with an inert gas to simulate ripeness, or allowed to change color, but not flavor, in transit. Endless combinations of carbohydrates and sugars to snack on. Obviously, this stream could go on forever. Certainly, it is not true that good food cannot be had in America. It is just that finding it has become damn hard work, and relatively few Americans are interested enough to take up the search. We have been conditioned to want what we want and want it now, without delay or inconvenience. And by and large, we make enough money to pay a premium for instant gratification (although, thankfully, a relative few of us choose to pay our premium for the slow gratification of the fresh, the natural, the best and the "old-fashioned"). And God bless good old American capitalism. It is simultaneously at its best and worst when it sets about fulfilling the desires that its own advertising machine has implanted in our brains! A couple of modest examples. Let's start with the chain, Arby's Roast Beef. One of my favorite metaphors for s*** happening, foodwise. Through some quirk of fate worthy of Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions", my path crossed that of the guys from Youngstown, Ohio who dreamed up Arby's. In the late 60s, I was looking for a little extra spending change in high school, so I took a part-time job at the first Arby's to open in the suburban Washington, DC area. There was great focus on that store, so the big boys from Youngstown showed up with great regularity to spout the corporate philosophy to us kids. Like all of the best food concepts, theirs was simple: lightly season and slow roast top rounds of beef medium to medium-rare, slice it paper-thin, and plop 3 1/2 ounces of it on the ubiquitous sesame seed roll that had been spread with a butter-flavored oil (real butter was too much to expect, even then) and toasted, all for just 69 cents. You could also get their patented Jamocha shake (coffee and chocolate together being pretty radical stuff in the 1960s), soft drinks and a bag of chips. No other sandwiches. Only chips, no fries. (We were told that fryers jacked up insurance rates, and besides, fries had a low profit margin.) That sandwich was a fast-food triumph, not unlike the original MacDonald's (real beef, real fresh-cut fries). And then it came undone, one irrational, painful step after another. American beef prices spiked, so they started using South American beef with a decided off-flavor. Then, they discovered that, while the cooked beef sat in a holding oven, it lost weight as the jus drained out, and jus is money, as they say. They also miscalculated the American love of fries. Thus, Arby's was reincarnated. The beef was replaced with a bologna-roll product that did not lose weight in the holding oven (thanks to the binding power of soy, I presume). Fries appeared, but not even frozen ones. Instead, they bought a high-tech device that mixed water and dehydrated potato flakes, extruded something that vaguely resembled French fries, and dropped them directly into hot oil, all with the touch of a button. I haven't eaten in an Arby's since. On a brighter note, consider the American classic, the Snickers bar. I will not whine about the shrinking-size-for-ever-increasing money issue, which is really about the intersection of marketing and greed. And a Snickers, lo and behold, still tastes like a Snickers. If you have watched it closely over time, however, you would have noticed that the thickness of the caramel, nougat and chocolate layers, and the number of peanuts per bar, are in a state of constant flux, depending upon the relative prices of sugar, corn syrup, chocolate and peanuts. That is the American way in action! Why does it so seldom occur to corporate America that Americans, of all people on earth, are best positioned to pay a premium for fresh, first-quality, naturally-flavored foodstuffs? I find it a mystery. And worse, since we now have not one, but several generations who grew up eating the crap on our supermarket shelves, properly aged beef tastes weird, even rotten to them and fresh vegetables have too much crunch to suit them. But Fritos, that's another story. I have neither the time nor energy at the moment to compare and contrast eating around the world with the American way of eating, but I leave you with two thoughts: Have you ever noticed how often relatively poor people in America eat as well as or better than those with greater wealth (barbeque in my neck of the woods, fresh seafood in Louisiana, green chilies in the Southwest, etc., etc.)? Is it a function of the proximity to the freshest and best ingredients, born of necessity? And lastly, have we vastly undervalued the social importance of tradition of the family dinner table? Families seem to hang together a whole lot better elsewhere in the world where the tradition is maintained. If Harris and Klebold were made to come home and wash up for dinner every night, would there have been a Columbine? For the record, I'm not a communist, despite my views on capitalism. But I am beginning to believe that I am a reactionary! Rant over!

Yes, but you Canadians always bear it with such grace. We're Americans. we will probably occupy Western Europe if the dollar doesn't firm up soon. Give Bordeaux a "Napa East" appellation. That sort of thing...

Weak dollar hits Bill Klapp! My wife is in Italy with all of our credit cards, and I sit here helplessly, going on-line now and again and watching the numbers climb!

Mother's. Poydras Street, near the Windsor Court Hotel. Roast beef po-boy "dressed"-mayo, Creole mustard, cabbage (the slaw makes itself as you eat the sandwich!), gravy and a handful of what they call "debris", which are the crisp brown bits of meat that fall off a properly cooked pot roast. Afterward, eat at the admittedly brilliant fine-dining establishments above. And then ask yourself if any of the latter meals were as deeply satisfying as that po-boy! I weep openly whenever I think of that sandwich. Thus, I'm thinking of Casamento's now to take my mind off my troubles...

It amazes me that the thread is as long as it is, with very few people willing to step up and name names. I'll name one-Crook's Corner in Chapel Hill, NC. A great restaurant, but not even a barbeque joint. Go figure. No hushpuppies, baked beans or fried okra, and no Brunswick stew. (I am warning you in advance in case you are seeking the full monte barbeque experience.) Just some of the finest NC vinegar-based Q I have ever eaten, served with an atypical red cabbage slaw to die for. I have never met barbeque that I would not eat. Even that heretical beef stuff in the Midwest and Texas. I will say, however, that in the Carolinas, the mustard-based and tomato-based sauces, however delicious they may be, mask the flavor of the pork. In my experience, only the eastern NC sauce, which is little more than vinegar and an assortment of peppers, actually enhances the flavor of pork. (Allen & Sons on the outskirts of Chapel Hill can deliver the full monte for you.)

Do I take it from the foregoing that some people travel for reasons OTHER THAN to eat? Why? It seems so pointless! I am of the view that sightseeing is something you do to walk off a meal...

Robert: I am convinced that Murray's Cheese Shop is the only artisanal cheese center in NYC. I know that French exporters print up little stickers indicating that they have aged their cheeses the requisite USDA time to eliminate the raw milk curse, and then slap them on any cheese they like. And I believe that Murray's has the good sense not to question French labelling! jackal10: Go for it! You hit at least 5 of my 10, seemingly without any effort at all!

For a party at Craig's house, I would expect him to pass out bottles as gifts. He is, after all, a wine professional...

I actually looked at the Wine Angels stuff, and it makes me a little ill. They withheld a sufficient amount of data to keep you from concluding that WS sells scores. What you could glean was, in my view, worse. The real objective of the "service" being sold was to encourage winemakers to manipulate their Chardonnays in a way calculated to make James Laube utter the magic words "pear" and "fig" in his review. The second thing that becomes obvious is the Spectator's focus on California, Australia and New Zealand wines at the expense of reviewing and praising classic and far more worthy French and Italian wines. I felt vindicated, because the data showed what I have always believed: WS knows its audience, and panders to its taste. That taste is a preference for easily understood, fruity, pleasant wines at a reasonable price. I have no problem with that, but the flip side is that WS is all but useless to serious wine collectors. Add to that a general perception that the people reviewing the wines are second or third-rate at best (and I will step up to the plate on Suckling, who heaps his praise and allots most of his time to the often highly drinkable but ultimately mediocre wines of his adoptive Tuscany at the expense of coverage of many vastly superior, collectible Piemontese wines). I have decided that the Wine Angels reports are no better than signposts on American capitalism's personal highway to hell. Teaching winemakers to pander to Parker's or Tanzer's palate would be dubious at best, but the Wine Spectator? I hope Wine Angels dies an early and timely death. We don't need more wines custom-crafted for ratings points.

If you cultivate your friends properly, I find that they can acclimate themselves fairly well to drinking hundreds or thousands of dollars of your wine rather than the Turning Leaf that they would have served! The most gracious will realize the extent of your generosity and do crazy things like pick up your food tab...

Hotel Lungarno in Firenze. 4-star, every room with a view of the Arno and the Ponte Vecchia. Beautifully appointed small hotel, and just minutes to walk to all of the museums and shopping. Don't know about price (we went in the off-season), but one of the finest small hotels we have ever stayed in. Owned by the Ferragamo family, but no discount on shoes for guests!

Alex F-Are your prices for one person, including wine? If so, with the Euro at $1.15, I may not be able to afford to go skiing this winter!

If you have to buy 2000 Bordeaux, you may have to try and weasel out on the bet with a "rump and ONE"!

I say that the too ripe rap could be overstated. There are, to be sure, Baroli for which that will be true. On the other hand, you have wines like Giacosa's new Le Rocche that are looking mighty good. And let us not necessarily tar Barbaresco with the same brush. Gaja, for instance, made his best wines ever in 1997. I have had the 1997 Sori Tildin (obviously, at someone else's expense!), and it is a stunning wine. It was served with a 1974 Giacosa Barbaresco Santo Stefano Riserva and a 1989 Aldo Conterno Gran Bussia (one of my all-time favorite Baroli), and most guests thought that the Tildin blew both away. That is unheard of for a Gaja single vineyard with only 5 years on it. The wine showed incredible balance, big, ripe fruit masking fine tannins, but clearly the structure to age. Having also had a number of lesser (aren't they all?) Barbarescos from the 1997 vintage, I am a believer. On the other hand, Sandrone made a thin, weak 1997 Cannubi, and some of the other 1997 Baroli have not shown me much. I bought only a couple of Baroli from that vintage. Based upon my sampling, I am not convinced that overripeness is the only problem to be found in the 1997 Baroli, but am convinced that at least some great ones were made.