slkinsey

This is interesting, because I don't gather that Smirnoff is all that less expensive than Luksusowa and, IMO, Luksusowa is a far superior product. Just looking at NYC retail prices, Smirnoff is around $16/liter while Luksusowa is $17/liter. Finlandia, on the other hand, is $16 for only 750ml (also not as good as Luksusowa, IMO). (Prices from Sherry-Lehmann.com)

Out of curiosity, what do we know about Old Tom gin other than it was sweet? Would it be possible to make a reasonable Old Tom facsimile just by adding a little sugar? I have always understood that people who have tasted examples of Old Ton Gin found it more or less indistinguishable from London gin mixed with sugar. Weren't there, at least as of a few years ago, some brands of Old Tom for sale? Boord's comes to mind.

Actually, responding to both Curlz and Tommy, I have always found their prices very reasonable... for what you get. And what you get, mostly, is high-end professional stuff. High-end restaurant stuff is not, as a rule of thumb, particularly inexpensive.

Here is a little page of information on New York Metro. The Village Voice singled them out for "gooiest okonomiyaki" in their 2000 "Best of NYC." Here is a short piece by Cynthia Killian in the NY Post.

We have some "temple recommend" LDS friends who have been over a few times. Alcohol was served at all of those meals, and they never had a problem with it. Unlike members of many other religions with dietary restrictions, who might be offended or religiously "tainted" to even be around you while you consume proscribed foods, I have not found this to be the case with Mormons and "mind altering substances" like caffeine and alcohol. I mean, I wouldn't bring a cup of coffee into an LDS church, and I wouldn't serve pork if some of my dinner guests were religious Muslims... but I wouldn't not offer coffee after a meal just because some of my guests were Mormon.

SWEET!!! Bridge has always been my go-to kitchenware store in the City.

I have to try some of these. I have to confess that I tend to stay away from Rieslings grown/produced outside its traditional geography because they don't seem to taste like Riesling to me. Do the NY ones taste anything like traditional Rieslings?

Why not cultivated grain? Humans have been eating cultivated grain for something like 10,000 years, and their closely-related wild ancestors far longer than that. I think it's a mistake, also, to assume that cultivated grain is somehow "unnatural." The process through which wild grains became domesticated grains was entirely natural (e.g., mutated wheat stalks that didn't shatter were more likely to be collected by hunter-gatherers, etc.). Other crops transitioned from wild to domesticated in a similarly native fashion (e.g., melon seeds passing through the digestive tract and later sprouting plants in latrine sites). It's as natural as, well, evolution.

Are you talking about Fee Brothers bitters? If you're looking for orange bitters, I suggest you find yourself a recipe for Gary Regan's orange bitters (it's in a number of his books) and make it yourself. It's 100 times better than Fee Brothers' and should be less expensive in the long run. Fee Brothers' aromatic (similar to Angostura) bitters is also very good. As for Regan's Orange Bitters #5 (I think it's #5)... I am thinking about making a massive quantity and offering some to the eG crowd.

Depends on the single malt, really. I went around 5:1 vodka:scotch with this one, and thought that was just about right. Lagavullin is a very full-bodied scotch, though. With something lighter-bodied, like Ardberg 10, you could go 4:1. Somewhere between 5-4:1 strikes me as about right, depending on how much you want to stretch out the flavor of the malt. As long as you use an Islay malt (which is the whole point), the smokyness is going to be right there at either ratio. It mostly depends on how much of a malt backbone you want in the glass.

Aw, shucks. One thing I like about it is that it's a very large shaker, so I can mix several drinks at once and still get good aeration. And now, since I'm thinking of Audrey, here is her Dreamy Dorini Smoking Martini. It's essentially vodka with a splash of smokey single malt scotch (the original recipe calls for Laphroaig 10) and a few drops of Pernod. I used Ricard and Lagavullin with equally interesting results. The barware -- both the mixing glass and the stirring spoon -- is all ancesteral. Especially interesting is the glass. It's not a shaker. It's designed for stirred cocktails. I've never seen another one like it. Ingredients. In the cocktail stirrer. Here's a top view of the stirrer. You can see it is designed to hold back the ice when pouring the drink. Finished drinks (sans lemon twist, because I didn't have a lemon in ths house). So... that's another few pieces of cool barware. I encourage you all to try the Smoking Martini. The dilution of the single malt by the vodka really exposes a lot of interesting flavors that are often obscured when drinking the product straight (which is always mostly an olfactory experience) and spreads them out for examination by your palate.

Yes -- and more, I think. I gather that it also means, "not long time refrigerated."

I've always wanted to go to one of the live markets in metro NYC and get a couple of freshly killed chickens (well, also some freshly killed roosters plus blood for coq au vin). Perhaps I'll have to make some pan fried freshly killed chicken too...

I imagine most would say this. But, my personal experience and the research results I've seen suggest that it is not the top priority for most Western vegetarians in preparing their meals -- and that the other priorities frequently get in the way of a delicious result. For example, I have a vegetarian friend who regularly cooks what he calls "greens and beans" -- e.g., collard greens and black beans. Sometimes he'd do a fried egg instead of the beans. I asked him once why he did the beans or eggs with the greens or why he didn't sometimes do both. His answer had nothing to do with taste whatsoever, but rather had to do with making sure the dish had protein in it. In other words, the actual taste of the dish was of decidedly secondary importance to the nutritional qualities. He did his best on the flavor side, I suppose, but the fact remains that he didn't add the beans because he thought it would make the dish taste better (it's also notweorthy that he took the time to educate himself on the nutritional stuff but not on the culinary "making good-tasting food" stuff). Including/excluding "allowable" ingredients for non-gustatory reasons is a big stumbling block along the way to making food taste good. My feeling is that, when something other than "deliciousness" is the primary goal of a dish, the gustatory quality of the dish will necessarily suffer. A religious Indian vegetarian, for example, wouldn't just say "this cauliflower and potato dish needs more protein, so I'll just chuck in some dal." This goes to my primary point. It's not the case that most Western vegetarians simply to confine their diet to certain products and proceed from there directly towards a quality gustatoty result. That's more like the religion model. Kosher cooks or religious vegetarian cooks are able to start with a restricted list of ingredients and proceed directly towards a goal of gustatory quality. This is because the restricted list of ingredients isn't the result of some other agenda -- it is the agenda. Someone who chooses to be a vegetarian for perceived health reasons, for example, has a fundamentally different outlook in their cookery. The first question is not "what can I do to make dinner taste good?" but rather "what are the health implications of dinner, and what do I have to do in order to make dinner comply with my health-related philosophy?" This is the kind of thinking that makes someone dump a can of pinto beans into a pan of collard greens purely for health reasons without considering whether the dish will taste better as a result. It's definitely true that Western vegetarian cuisine is still not very mature and there aren't a lot of good choices. But, until gustatory quality becomes the prime consideration, I am not sure there ever will be -- especially since the different concerns of most Western vegetarians are so fragmented and different. It's also the case that someone who restricts his/her diet for health, ethical, political, etc. kinds of reasons will inevitably end up working in a much narrower range of possibility than someone whose diet is more-or-less automatically restricted by religion, culture or environment. Well, exactly. That's my point. And, as a result, Western omnivores have worked with the ingredients available to them with the primary purpose of making those ingredients taste good. As a result, we have a strong Western omnivore tradition of great-tasting omnivore cookery.

Yea. It's totally easy to clean. One of the nice things about a really heavy duty one like mine is that all the parts are stainless. We don't have a dishwasher, but I'm sure having one woud make cleaning even easier.

Cool pics, Robert. Just FYI -- for you and anyone else who may read this thread -- We actually have the capability to host digital photos for eGullet members right here on our own server. Check out http://images.egullet.com/ to see where you can upload pictures for inclusion in eGullet threads.

Thanks for your thoughts, Sethro. My take on GSIM is that, just like most Chinese restaurants in the US, you have to order the right things. In the case of your meal, the lobster and ribs are something I would never order. They're not Sichuan. As of the Dan Dan noodles, my understanding is that they're supposed to be oily from the chili oil. I'd be interested to hear what it was that you didn't like about the wontons in chili oil. They've been popular around here. Anyway... if you like spice and you liked the ma po dofu, try the beef fillets in chili sauce. Usually the hottest thing on the meny. The freshly killed kung pao chicken is also not to be missed. We also enjoy the stir fried pea shoots and the house cured bacon with bea pods and rice cake for a mild change of pace.

These days one often hears the term "food porn" to describe closeups and other pictures of delicious food. I figured that plenty of us have cool barware and/or interesting-looking cocktails, so why shouldn't we have some fun too? Please post pictures here of your cool barware (hopefully in the act) and other cool cocktail-related pictures from your home. The pictures below I took this evening while making a Bloodhound in one of my favorite cocktail mixers that I like to tall "the big silver cock shaker" for reasons that will become apparent... A Bloodhound is: 2.0 oz : gin 0.5 oz : white vermouth 0.5 oz : red vermouth 6-8 raspberries Muddle raspberries in mixing glass. Add ice. Shake & strain. Here's everything. Big cock shaker in the back there. Berries and booze go in. Muddle. Add some ice. Shake. Finished drinks. Closeup from the top. This is too many pictures, really, of only one drink and only one piece of barware -- but I wanted to get the ball rolling. So, let's see what you have.

They have both Vegemite and Marmite at Fairway. In fact, the last time we were at the Uptown Fairway I challenged Fat Guy to do a comparitive tasting of the two... no dice.

My guess is that they charge more for cold because they can. They figure that, if it's all that important to you that the beer is cold right away, it's worth the extra 33 cents a bottle. IIRC, it's not atypical to charge a little more for already-cold beer.

How so Sam? Sweet vermouth can be either red or white (generally 15-16 percent alcohol/30-32 proof with about 15 percent residual sugar). Then there's dry vermouth that is white (generally 18 percent alcohol/36 proof containing about 5 percent sugar). Because I think that, for the purposes of mixing, the taste difference between a red and a white vermouth by far trumps any effects of the sugar percentage -- and I think the color difference (or rather the flavor difference that goes along with the color difference) is where the fundamental break lies. A sweeter or dryer white vermouth is still a white vermouth. Intra-vermouth sweetness differences provide a distinctly different and separate drinking experience primarily when one is drinking vermouth by itself. I don't feel that these differences are important enough to make a formula into a different cocktail if, for example, one uses sweet white vermouth instead of dry white vermouth. For example, a martini will still taste like a martini whether or not it is made with (dry) Noilly Pratt or (sweet) Cinzano Bianco -- both white vermouths. On the other hand, switch colors to red vermouth and the resultant cocktail won't taste at all like a martini (and, indeed, it wouldn't be a martini).

I think you're coming to this conclusion with absolutely nothing to back it up. It's an assumption on your part (and one I disagree with), not a conclusion of any sort. You're assuming that if a person doesn't actually say "I'm a vegetarian because I love vegetables," then it means he doesn't really like vegetables, or doesn't really care about how they taste one way or the other; that his philosophy, whatever it may be, overrides matters of taste or likes and dislikes. I think it's much more likely that, if asked, a vegetarian won't say it because he'll assume it's a given that he likes vegetables, and then get on to his other reasons, whatever they may be, because those reasons are not "givens." And yes, I agree with mongo_jones, evangelism is a terrible bore, isn't it. Think about it this way: Vegetarians are given a questionnaire about vegetarianism. Among the questions is something like this: Please examine the following list of potential reasons why you are a vegetarian and select the top 5 reasons, ranking them 1-5 according to how important these reasons are to your choice, with 5 being the most important: Political reasons Health concerns Ethical considerations I don't know Religion Don't like the taste of meat Love to eat vegetables Blah Blah Blah Okay... now, suppose that they give this questionnaire to some large sample of Western vegetarians and the results show that health considerations is the huge #1 reason, followed by ethical considerations, followed by political reasons, etc. with "love to eat vegetables" way down on the list. What does this tell us? It tells us that a gustatory preference for and appreciation of vegetarian cooking is not particularly important to most vegetarians in making this dietary choice. As Mongo correctly points out, perhaps this is due to the fact that Western vegetarian cuisine is so young. In contrast to most Western vegetarian cuisine (and I hope no one is arguing that the state of Western vegetarian cuisine is particularly good from a gustatory standpoint compared to Western omniverous cuisine, because this seems false on its face), Indian vegetarian cuisine is varied and delicious. Why? Well, because it isn't really a choice for most of these people -- or, if it is, it is only a choice insofar as one's religion is a choice (and for plenty, if not most people in the world, one's religion is not percieved a choice). What this means is that they didn't decide to eat a vegetarian diet, they started out with a vegetarian diet as a given and worked from there to make it a delicious one. Now, for me, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that if there is one group of cooks that starts out with vegetarian ingredients and approches those ingredients with the primary goal of making those ingredients taste good, the end result is going to taste better than most of the stuff made by another group who starts out with an even broader palette which is then deliberately narrowed down, and where the primary consideration is the (supposed) health benefits or ethical considerations or political implications associated with what they are eating.

I think the idea is that a gin-and-red-sweet-vermouth cocktail isn't a "martini" but rather something else. I have a recipe for a cocktail made with gin, sweet red vermouth and several raspberries, all shaken together. It isn't a martini. As for a gin-and-white-sweet-vermouth (viz. Cinzano Bianco, Martini & Rossi Bianco,etc.) cocktail... that strikes me as a martini. Even though these brands of vermouth are sweeter than, say, Noilly Prat, they're still fundamentally "dry" vermouths compared to their "Rosso" counterparts. Really, I think the distinction between "red" and "white" makes more sense than between "sweet" and "dry" or "French" and "Italian."

These aren't categories that represent sole answers to the question of why one has chosen to be a vegetarian. Rather they are answers that might be among one's motivations to pursue vegetarianism. I think it's noteworthy that actually liking the food they choose to eat is not a particularly high priority for most Western vegetarians, and this is clearly reflected in the overall poor gustatory quality of Western vegetarian cuisine. I don't know... no more than it is to say, "I'm an omnivore because I love meat and vegetables." Where I think you have a point is that Western vegetarianism does not represent so much a choice to eat certain foods, but rather a choice to not eat certain foods -- and there are certain philosophies behind those choices. This, I agree, tends to lead to evangelism. And, for what it's worth, if you're one of those people who really belives that eating animals is murder or eating raw food will make you live 150 years or whatever, how could you not share that with the people around you?

This is something Steingarten discusses in his books, I think. If you look at most of the vegetarians in the world who are vegetarians in a predominately omniverious society rather than places like India where vegetarianism is quite common and complex vegetarian cuisines have evolved over centuries due to religious reasons, almost all of them in the Western world are in the US and UK. An interesting fact is that, while French and Italian omniverous diets include lots of vegetables because people from these cultures love vegetables, most American and British vegetarians pursue their dietary philosophy for reasons other than a love of vegetables. When Western vegetarians are asked why they are vegetarians, health considerations is far and away the top answer, followed by ethical/political reasons. "I love vegetables" is fairly low on the list, somewhere after "I don't know." What this means is that most vegetarians in the US and UK tend on average to be evangelical about vegetarianism, because their dietary choice is founded in strong beliefs of one kind or another. This is another reason why, on average, US and UK vegetarian cuisine lags so far behind others around the world in quality, with the food tending to get worse as the dietary philosophy becomes more dogmatic. This makes sense, when one considers that the gustatory quality of the food that is consumed becomes less and less important as the dietary philosophy diverges more from the mainstream and becomes more rigid. It is only with extreme care, considerable expertise and creative talent (e.g., at NYC's Pure Food & Wine) that something as extreme as raw vegan food is made enjoyable and non-monotonous from a purely gustatory standpoint.