GG Mora

Fenugreek is a potent expectorant. I've been able to avoid taking antibiotics for a sinus infection by dosing up on a fenugreek/goldenseal blend. Amazing, the stuff that starts to come out... Your remedy sounds much more delicious, though. I have all the ingredients in the house and plan on whipping up a batch post-haste, and I'm not even sick. My best hangover cure is a big, greasy cheeseburger, accompanied by fries, Coke with lots of ice, and DARK sunglasses.

Jeffrey -- Thanks so much for your delightful and measured response to my slightly shrewish query. I'll be seeking out, with alacrity, the pasta recipe you described. I do believe that I, that we all, can make a difference on this matter by exposing as many people as we can to delicousness in any form. My husband's kids came into my life recently, with limited exposure but open minds, and you can bet I turn them on to great new stuff wherever I can. And they, in turn, share what they've learned and tasted with their friends. Their school encourages parents to come in and work with the kids, sharing any "special knowledge" we may have. I'm trying to work up a few fun, nonthreatening presentations to expose a few more kids to "real" food. If you can imagine, I'd like to start with vinaigrette; it was a revelation to "my" kids that it was better than the stuff from a bottle. Hell, I could even work in a little science lesson about emulsification. That kind of thing. Forgive me, but I need to do the fawning fan-of-your-writing thing here. I binged on both of your books, and when finished did the reader's equivalent of searching the corners of the potato chip bag for crumbs. Don't forget the onion dip. GG

Thanks for all the feedback. In an interesting twist, someone else brought a bottle to the small dinner party I attended last night. It's not so odd, really, this being small town Vermont where the wine stores are few and the choices on the random side. I apologize in advance that my wine vocabulary is limited. The '97 Brane-Cantenac was delightful – nothing off about it. The nose was full and spicy, and I'd swear there were hints of rosemary, but I can be so off at picking up on hints. The flavor was rich, fruity, and what I would call "expansive"; it lightly singed those key spots under the tongue. My only criticism is that the whole in-the-mouth experience dissipated a little too quickly. Perhaps this what you meant, Mark, when you said it was "light"? It was a pleasant an unobtrusive accompaniment to the meal: gnocchi in white truffle cream, followed by beef Wellie (didn't know anyone made that anymore) and winter squash. And it rather showed up the other plonk being served. Anyway, for $38 a bottle, I plan on picking up two or three for quaffing over the hols. Definitely outclasses a number of other selections in that price range. As to finding other vintages, that's not so easy to do here, but if I get out into the world any time soon, I'll certainly seek out the '99 for comparison. For the record, wine prices in Vermont run on the very high side.

At a chef pal's annual Xmas Eve Do, he made an hors d'oeuvre of pitted date, slit lengthwise with a sliver of foie gras tucked in, broiled just until the foie sizzled. Excellent. Most memorable, though, I recall for its sheer wrong-headedness. At a restaurant here in VT, one highly lauded for all the wrong reasons, IMO, there was of a midwinter's evening an appetizer described thusly: a potato pancake topped with a crabcake topped with a slice of seared foie gras. When I came to*, I barely knew where to begin deconstructing such an abomination. *The mere description did me in. I would never dream of ordering a faux pas of this magnitude. Spelling, of course.

At a local wine shop today I noticed a number of bottles of 1997 Brane Cantenac deeply discounted. Normally going for $54 & change, they were marked down to $38 something. I asked the shop owner "why so cheap?", wondering if the wine was known to have gone a little off or something. He told me that it had to do with the not-so-recent fracas over the French refusal to play with us in Iraq, that the American shunning of produits de France was leading importers and distributors to drop prices in an effort to move inventory. There was another Bordeaux similarly marked down. A few questions: Is this likely to be true? If so, is a 1997 Brane Cantenac worth drinking at $38/bottle? Should I go back and buy up every last one? Thanks for any input. Edited for clarity (I hope).

What about your very own publication ala Ed Behr's "Art of Eating"? I'll be your first subscriber...

Wow! The snowballing culinary revolution in America! Everybody's in on it! Widespread gastronomic knowledge! There'll soon come a day when we won't ever have to eat bad food again! Even Grandma's using Extra Virgin Olive Oil! Or is it a sign of the coming apocalypse? The olive oil at Grandma's is rancid, because she got a great deal on it at TJ Max...and Grandma, sadly, doesn't know from rancid. Holy shit! Bill and Mary, king and queen of potato chips and onion dip and pigs-in-a-blanket, are suddenly serving tomato-mozzarella salad at their annual open house! But the mozzarella is the plasticky crap from the supermarket, the tomatoes are out-of-season mealy-pink cardboard, the balsamic is ersatz, and they couldn't find fresh basil, so they used dried and supplemented it with fresh dill (they're "creative"!). Your best friend, whose favorite cookbook up until now has been the Marlboro Man BBQ Book, got the El Bulli book for Christmas....He's throwing a no-holds-barred dinner, all cooked from the El Bulli book, and you're invited! What hath we wrought? And is there any turning back?

I love Guido's. I used to travel back and forth quite a bit from my home in Southern VT to visit friends in Dutchess County, NY. I'd usually take RT 22 to avoid traffic and endless stoplights, but occasionally I'd brave RT 7 just so I could hit Guido's. I keep praying that something similiar will appear in Manchester, VT, but so far the offerings remain dismal.

We can run out of just about anything else and survive, but if there's no beer or no garlic, we're fucked.

The Alice's Restaurant Cookbook, by Alice May Brock. I'll give you all a moment to stop laughing and huffing. Somebody gave my Mom this book as a joke when it first came out. Pretty good joke, too -- hippie-ethos for the uptight suburban housewife. She passed it off to me when I got my first apartment. At the time, I knew next to nothing about cooking, outside of making scrambled eggs or boxed cakes. Mind you, the recipes in this book are pretty loose and goofy. Canned and packaged products are frequently called for, and nothing requires any fussy cooking technique. But the book is written in such a warm, easy, free-wheeling style, with so much encouragement towards improvisation in ingredients, technique and equipment, that it breeds a sort of infectious fearlessness in the kitchen. In the wrong hands, I suppose it might foment a lifetime of bad cooking, confidently perpetuated. In my case, it simply got me started on a lifetime of perpetually improved pursuits in the kitchen, as I moved on to Julia, Anne Willan, Rick Bayless, Francois Payard, Andre Soltner, George Perrier, Robuchon. This is the book that every first-time cook should start with. Serious. Edited so as to spell the author's name correctly.

Okay, that's just fucking hilarious. They even have a BBQ forum, complete with coleslaw recipe. Love this petit nugget: Mais, oui. Il faut bien deconstruire l'alliance entre les crudités et la sauce. :sniff:

Isn't anyone at all concerned that jwagnerdsm disappeared so abruptly and hasn't been heard from since? I PM'd him 2 days ago to see if he was okay, but haven't heard back. I'm sure he just got busy and blogging wasn't his priority, but I'm a fussy worrier that way. Hope nothing happened. "...he tried to get down to the end of the town; 30 shillings reward." I, for one, would love to spend Christmas week with The Jackal.

I was recently at a friend's house having coffee & we were just hanging out at her kitchen table yakking. At some point, her 3-yr old walked into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, took out a can of whipped cream, and walked over to the table, where she silently held the can out to her mother. Without stopping her conversation or even looking away, Mom gave the can a quick shake, popped the top, stuck the nozzle into the child's open waiting mouth, squirted in an appropriate dose, replaced the cap and handed the can back to the child, who promptly returned the can to the refrigerator and left the room. Five minutes later, the scene was repeated in exact detail with the 5-yr old. That's how whipped cream should be eaten.

Aren't the ovens impossibly small? A friend used to have an AGA (she has since gone through the ordeal of removing it and replacing with an 8-burner Garland or something) and I cooked in her kitchen a couple of times. I recall trying to shoehorn a roasting pan into one of the ovens and having to hunt around and switch to a smaller pan at the last minute. I also recall that having more than two pots on the top at one time was a frustration. Just my 2¢.

Hmmm, guess I got a little whine mixed in whith my wince. :wha??:

This doesn't address your query in any useful way, but milk chocolate is specifically the taste of Christmas to me. Any other time of year, I limit my chocolate intake to the dark and bitter varieties. At Christmastime, though, I always seem to be at the mercy of someone else's chocolate preference. If I happen to ingest milk chocolate any other time of year, I have a Proustian sense memory, much in the same way as the smell of fresh balsam signals Christmas, no matter the season.

No disresepct to Bourdain, but did you feel he was writing about high end places or that his book reflected life in the kitchens of starred restaurants in France? No, but neither did I think Mr. Klapp was making a suggestion specifically about high-end or starred French joints. My point, however, is that I think it's on the glib side to assume Mssr. Jaubert's suicide is necessarily linked to his being a chef. But this wouldn't be the first time I'd been proven a jackass by the facts. My guess is, it'd take a whole lot more than that to dis Bourdain. Edited for assinine spelling error. I just hope I spelled assinine correctly. :whince:

I think Bourdain already made that abundantly clear in KC. Still, the linking of his suicide to his being a chef is a little too knee-jerk.

A digital scale that swings both ways (metric or foot-pound). It's so much easier to cook by weight (mostly baking) that I've started calculating the weights for any recipe with ingredients not given in weight & scribbling the weights in pencil. Also, my Braun Multi-Mix. The hand-mixer part is defunct, but the stick blender is essential, as is the little mini-food processor attachment. And any kitchen should have the type of vegetable parer with the handle perpendicular to the blade. Much easier to use.

I love grocery shopping. Sometimes it's my only opportunity for socializing. :grimace:

And Gigondas. Always chaps my ass when some snotty staff corrects me. "You mean 'zhee-gon-DAH'". No, actually. Pity about Mssr. Jaubert. Perhaps the suicide had nothing to do with his being a chef?

Leek and goat cheese. Melt the leeks in butter, then season with S&P and a little balsamic vinegar. Then blend into the egg mix with crumbled goat cheese. Bacon added makes this even better.

We lived in Louisiana when I was a kid, from like '61 – '64. It snowed once back then. Me and the sibs all had pneumonia at the time, but my parents – diehard Yankees – let us go out and play in it anyway. I wish that some of you could experience a good storm like this here in Vermont (or anywhere that snow is a regular thing). I'm not trying to be smug when I say that we're much better equipped to deal with snow, and it takes a monster of a storm to really slow things down. We just plan around it: make sure the cars are gassed up for maximum ballast, allow an extra full or half hour (depending on quantity) for snow removal in the morning so as to still get where you're going on time. I suppose, though, that it takes a certain kind of individual to want to live here. No matter. The storm's just starting to get cranked up here, but predictions are for as much as a foot and a half by tomorrow morning. And how will I spend my snowy Saturday? I'm going to make a quick trip to a local dairy farm and draw off 3 gallons of raw milk with which to make a holiday batch of dulce de leche. Once that reaches its simmering phase, I'm going to busy myself braising some short ribs for dinner. Then I can leave everything humming on the stove, strap on my snowshoes, and go galavanting in the woods with my big white dog. Sometimes on clear moonlit nights, we'll go snowshoeing after dinner. Magic. Edited to add: The lower population density accounts for a lot, too. Much easier to navigate when you're the only car on the road. All that changes, though, when the out-of-towners crowd in for ski weekends and holidays. Many SUV drivers seem to think that the size of their vehicles and 4WD make them invincible, and so keep up their 60-mph velocity. But guess who you always see being dragged out of a snowbank by a wrecker? [hint]It's not the 80-yr. old Vermonter in his Crown Vic with baloney skins for tires.[/hint]

Serendipity just led me to this. Or was it synchronicity?

Did anyone else hear about the guy who won the chili contest in...I think it was Texas? He had to forfeit his win on account of his secret ingredient, which was...other entrant's chili. He brought no chili of his own, just went around with sample cups and collected small portions of everyone else's, then mixed them all together in a pot. Delicious! Heard about this on NPR's "Wait, Wait..Don't Tell Me".