slkinsey

Ah. Good size. Actually, I vastly prefer cocktails at around 3 ounces -- and I wish restaurants would serve them at that size. This is enough for a bracingly cold drink that stimulates the palate without dulling the senses. FWIW, if I were drinking them, I'd much rather have those 2 ounce cocktails of yours served in a 2.5 or 3 ounce cocktail glass with a nice bit of "collar" (aka. empty glass at the top) than in a shooter glass filled almost to the brim. Just poking my nose in with that thought.

My Rifi should arrive on Wednesday ! Sigh... I ordered a Souss tagine, but according to the UPS tracking information, it was shipped to Davenport, Iowa. Working out how to get that fixed.

Per my post back here, I find that the addition of corn makes it turn out too dark by the time it's cooked through.

What? No okra?!

Interesting cocktail with pisco, espresso and chocolate liqueur mentioned here.

Here are some pictures of various food trucks around MIT, including one of the falafel truck that was somewhat famous around those parts in the late 70s/early 80s. https://alum.mit.edu/postcards/ViewCollection.dyn?id=2 Here's some news about the falafel truck from 1998: http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1998/moishe-1104.html More interesting stuff about food trucks around MIT: http://www-tech.mit.edu/V121/N17/17food.17n.html http://www-tech.mit.edu/V120/N7/Food_Trucks.7f.html http://www-tech.mit.edu/V119/N14/Food_Trucks_rev.14a.html

Yea, I'd heard that Torani Amer is really the better product in modern times, and closer to the old Amer Picon than today's Amer Picon is. I wonder why the Amer Picon people would decide to change the formula like that? Well, anyway, it makes me feel better about not having any Amer Picon. The Brooklyn is definitely on my list (see above). The recipe I was planning on using has 1/4 ounce each of maraschino and amer, though, instead of a dash of each. This means I'll have to try both, now. You know... for the sake of science.

Buy a dozen eggs. Make a leek, onion and carrott fritata for the antipasto. Total cost, let's say $1.80. Buy two pounds of De Cecco "orecchiette" ($2.60 total), a pound of hot Italian-style pork sausage ($3.50) and several large heads of broccoli ($3.00). Make orecchiette with sausage and broccoli as the main course. That's around 11 dollars so far. Dessert for 6 with 4 dollars? Hmmm... 6 bosc pears will probably run you about 4 dollars. Poach them with water and sugar.

The only cocktail with tea I've had is Audrey's Earl Grey MarTEAni. In that drink the Early Grey infused Tanqueray works very well. But Earl Grey is, of course, a fairly assertive flavor. Anyway, with tea flavors I think it probably makes more sense to infuse the tea into the base liquor rather than brewing some tea and using it as a modifier. An ounce or two of brewed tea will probably get lost in most cocktails. Lapsang souchong is another very assertive tea that comes to mind. It's dried over burning pine and has a distinctively smokey flavor. I wonder what could be done with infusing lapsang souchong into some kind of liquor. Might be interesting. Maybe a riff on the Sidecar: lapsang souchong-infused brandy, Cointreau and lemon juice... or, if the flavors worked, you could take it further in the Chinese direction by using Canton Ginger Liqueur instead of Cointreau... or you could go with something like 2 oz. lapsang souchong infused brandy, 1 oz. Stone's Original Ginger (ginger flavored currant wine), 1/4 oz. Grand Marnier, 1 dash bitters (Peychaud's comes to mind for some reason -- but I'm making this all up at work, so the whole idea could completely suck). As with the MarTEAni, you'd probably want to use an egg white to smooth out the tannins from the tea. To a certain extent, it all depends on which kind of Asian one is talking about. When I'm thinking of cocktails, my mind tends to go towards Southeast Asia rather than towards East Asia. I'm not sure how I'd put distinctively Korean, Chinese or Japanese flavors into a cocktail. But things like exotic citrus, lemongrass, coconut, kaffir lime leaves and tamarind work on the brighter side, and then there are all the sweet spices used in some of the other countries down there. Then, the idea of classic cocktails with an Asian twist adds another layer. I would think that much could be done to impart an Asian twist simply by using, e.g., lemongrass infused gin in a classic formula, or using tamarind instead of a more traditional acid.

It's official: the Shake Shack reopens on Monday, April 4. The hours of operation for April will be 11am-4pm, seven days a week. Summer hours will begin May 1.

Grazie. I agree that it can work... it just depends on the inherrent strength of the food item. Parboiling and sauteing cubes of potato, for example, should work just fine. But with matchstick cuts like johnjohn describes above, I think they would have a tendency to snap in half if agitated.

What exactly does "toothy" texture mean? I tend to cook my porridge so that it's firm and chewy, not mushy. That's how I prepared this. Exactly. When I think "porridge" I tend to think of grains that have been cooked to the point of a (hopefully) pleasant mushiness. For example, rice in a well cooked ricotto still has a bit of an "al dente" quality to it, whereas the rice in congee has been cooked far beyond that stage. I also tend to think of things in the porridge/gruel family as having a fairly soupy texture. One thing with oats is that they relase a lot of thickeners into the cooking water. So, if you use a lot of water, you end up with something that is more or less little bits of cooked oats suspended in an equal amount of thickened liquid. That's what your picture looks like to me, although of course that may not be what it really turned out to me. My thought in using a risotto-like technique is that it might create an appropriately creamy texture, but that using smaller amounts of liquid might limit the "pudding like" quality that oatmeal can have.

Okay... so I just scored three bottles of Torani Amer. Now, as you may well imagine, I have a serious itch for Amer-ish cocktails. Any suggestions are appreciated. I will naturally try a facsimile of Picon Punch and a Brooklyn Cocltail. And I'm dying to try Hoskins Cocktail. After that, I'm open so suggestions.

Did you hold it up in the air and shout: "avenoooooooooooooooooottooooooooooooo!" (For the perplexed: see Roots.) It might be interesting to cook the oats risotto style, by adding simmering stock bit by bit and stirring. I'd think you would want the oats a bit more toothy for avenotto than you would for porridge.

I love the way The Dude orders a White Russian in "The Big Lebowski."

Good luck, Scott! Really. Although I won't need any Torani Amer in the forseeable future, having just bought three bottles over the internet from California (shhhhhhh!), I'd love to see this product available in NYC. Seems strange that all the other Torani products except Amer are widely available. I guess because Amer is the only one with alcohol...

Probably because it is commonly consumed somewhat sweetened. And perhaps also because rolled oats -- the kind with most people are familiar -- wouldn't have a very appealing texture as a savory side. You're right, though, there's no reason some "parmesan steel cut oats" wouldn't make an interesting part of a savory meal. Probably have to call it something silly like "avenotto" to get people to make the nexessary paradigm shift.

Cocktail flights are cool. They're been doing them at Flatiron Lounge here in NYC for some time now. It's especially an interesting way for newcomers to the game to have a taste of several classics with which they might not be familiar.

Interesting idea. I think just about any cocktail would work in this size, although obviously the context of the other cocktails around it will influence the success. Questions: What is the size of the miniature cocktails? How many do you normally serve together at once? How do you keep them cold? Presumably they are not all mixed a la minute to order?

Scott, is this a commercial customer? Can't you sell to whichever distributors she already uses? Out of curiosity, are you talking about Torani Amer or Amer Picon?

I wonder if there's some way to make okra-crusted fried chicken... Use maybe 50% dried okra flour. Just a thought.

One crucial thing about frying chicken is working with your ingredients and oil temperature so the outside isn't too dark before the inside is cooked through. An oil temperature of 350 seems to work best for me. Where I've come into trouble isiwh the ingredients in my coating. For a while there I was trying to make a fried chicken coating that included either cornflake crumbs or cornmeal. This always turned out way too dark. Eventually I came to understand that corn is simply too high in sugar, and this is what was making the coating too dark. Patti, your thigh was probably too dark because of the hot sauce for similar reasons. If you had put a coating of flour on the outside, you probably wouldn't have had that problem.

Without seeing the vegetables, it's hard to say how they were prepared exactly. But I have some ideas. Given the delicacy of what you're talking about, it's highly unlikely that they were sauteed at all. Sauteing is a high heat technique where the ingredients are jumped around in the pan (the French verb sauter means "to jump") until evenly cooked on all sides. Matchstick vegetables would totally fall apart if they were cooked this way. (FWIW, I think "saute" is the most incorrectly used term in cooking.) Most likely, the vegetables were blanched in salted water, shocked in ice water and then gently warmed with butter and perhaps a little stock. For the best control, you would want to blanch each vegetable separately (each one will cook at a slightly different rate). Presumably, you want each piece to still have a little "bite." Almost any firm vegetable can be cooked this way. You could include matchsticks of red or green pepper, onion, potato, asparagus stems, broccoli stems, turnip, parsnip... whatever. For harder vegetables (potato, carrot, etc.) a mandolin is the easiest way to go. For things like onions and peppers, you're better off going by hand. I would recommend using at least some butter as the fat, because it will emulsify and coat the vegetables well. Garlic... I'm not so sure about. Mixtures like this tend to be relatively delicate in flavor, and you'd have to have a very careful hand with the garlic to avoid making the whole thing taste mostly of garlic. It would be a real shame to go to all the trouble of selecting an interesting mixture of vegetables only to have the whole thing turn out as "garlic flavor with some other stuff." Same thing with herbs. Thyme and parsley are the first ones that come to mind, but in very small amounts. Anyway... that's my two cents.

Interesting. I'll have to give that a try and see if it makes a noticable difference. My gut feeling is that it won't, because there have been a number of times when I have forgotten to add the salt at the beginning and threw it in towards the end -- and I don't remember thinking "wow! this is much creamier than last time." But, you never know. Now that I think about it, I do have a bunch of heavy one quart saucepans. I should make several batches in parallel (toasting with butter versus adding the same amount at the end, and adding salt at the beginning versus adding the same amount after 20 minutes). It will be interesting to see if there are any clearly noticable differences.

Interesting, my process is somewhat similar to the Cook's Illustrated method (see the recipe here) but much more simple. I toast the oats dry in the pan until they take just the tiniest bit of color and begin to smell fragrantly nutty. Then I add 2.5 times the volume of water plus a healthy pinch of salt and simmer on low for around 30 minutes, stirring occasionally with a heatproof rubber spatula. At the end, just as I'm getting ready to take it to the table, that's when I stir in some butter. I wonder what's the advantage of using butter at the beginning rather than at the end. I've always thought it was better to toast things like grains and bread crumbs dry. Usually when I'm using butter in cooking, I think it's better to add most of it at the end rather than cooking it for a long time. It seems to provide a more "buttery" flavor that way. It's also interesting to see how the butter emulsifies in the porridge and changes its texture when you add it at the end. Like most of their recipes, the Cook's Illustrated method seems overly fussy to me (don't add the salt until 20 minutes in to the cooking process?). I can't imagine using two separate pans to cook something as simple as oatmeal porridge. Do you really do all that stuff -- use two separate pans and all that -- or do you just toast the oats in the beginning? What do you think is the benefit of using water and milk as the cooking liquids? I've always thought that one of the miracles of steel cut oats is how creamy and rich it is just from the oat starch. Back when I used to eat rolled oats, I always poured on some milk at the table. After a while I realized that I don't do that any more with steel cut oats. I'll have to try the CI method next time to see if it makes any difference. I agree with you (and apparently with Cook's Illustrated, too) that it makes better sense to buy steel cut oats in bulk rather than buying the "brand name" varieties. Most of the time the stuff from the health food store is in better condition, and it's often around three times more expensive per pound.