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Placebo

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Everything posted by Placebo

  1. I've seen goat meat frozen at the grocery attached to Savoy on 148th in Redmond, just off 520. I know that Savoy serves goat because it's often in their buffet. I think I've seen it fresh at Viet-Wa on 12th and Jackson as well but I could be mistaken. -Amir
  2. I haven;t yet made it to Udapi though it comes highly recommended by South Indian friends. The only place I'll eat Indian, at this point, is Savoy, on 148th by the big Feewd Meyer, right off 520. They have a sizable grocery attached to the place though the stocks at the grocery have been slowly dwindling for months and I fear it will soon vanish altogether. They are a bit heavy on the ghee but the food has the complexity of flavor that I love in north Indian cooking. They have South Indian food as well and about the most extensive bffet I've ever seen,, though I tend to order a la carte entrees since I can get them hotter than the buffet default. It's the only thing that I miss about working on the East side. Many other places have been recommended to me but they all seem to sufer from the same problems. Each dish has a single primary flavor plus sweet. No copmplexity, life or body to any of it and they sweeten the hell out of nearly everything. It's a little weird even. -Amir
  3. The downtown one (on 6th is it?) has a pretty nice selection. I was just at the UVillage shop last night and it had a pretty decent selection as well.
  4. Yes, ditto on the list please. It sounds fantastic. I am willing to offer bribes of butter as needed.
  5. Placebo

    Dinner! 2004

    Tortelli stuffed (thanks eGCI!) with salmon, chevre and pecorino in sage butter with green beens, red chard and crushed red pepper. Made 5 dozen; 4 dozen are in my freezer and the rest are in my tummy. [Crappy pic taken with my phone's camera]
  6. I think that Whole Foods has the best selection I've seen in town, though I've not yet hit PFI. I've never had trouble getting things cut to order there and I don;t mind very hard cheeses coming pre-wrapped. DiLaurenti has a good selection - it's improved some in the last couple of years, even. There's another little cheese shop at Pike Place Market called Quality Cheese, I think, next to Frank's. They are small but just cheese (well, and olives and such). There is, of course, also Beecher's though our stock is limited to clean northwest cheeses along with some from northern California and Colorado. I miss James Cook - I always got great friendly service from james himself. I was sad to see they'd closed up.
  7. The ice cream situation at Beecher's has been a bit rough. Part of the problem has been that it's very difficult to find a place that will make clean ice cream mix to order in the pretty small quantities that we need so we got started probably two months later than planned and have had little time to work the kinks out of the process (something that's still ongoing). By clean I mean using organic and rBST-free dairy products, no artificial anything and no stabilizers other than egg yolk. So, no guar gum or the like, which means that it crystalizes a lot faster than most other ice creams. The aim was to have the most simple ingredient list possible and to go for that old-fashioned feel. As I said, we're still working the kinks out of the process. In the next week I'll be working more on running times with our machine to try and work on the texture a bit more. As for the extreme coldness I think we'd slipped behind on production so you probably got some that hadn't had enough time in the serving freezer to warm back up to serving tempareture. We've got a better back-stock of the stuff now so it's getting appropriate warm-up time and should now be getting served at a more friendly temperature. I've been in contact with Gus, the owner of Toscanini's in Boston (my very favorite ice cream since I was a wee tyke) and hope to get some advice from him on it but I suspect that as long as we remain free of gum or other non-egg stabilizers there will be crystalization issues. Dear lord what I'd do for a cone of Toscanini's right now. In any case, the ice cream is a late addition to the line and is still a work in progress. At this point the cheese and butter is where the action is really at. Thanks all for the input - it's always good to get feedback from knowledgable customers.
  8. I love ponzu with nabe. I also sometimes mix up a sesame-miso sauce for it. Aditionally I have this very small jar of some sort of green thick sauce from Japan that a friend brought back from me. I have no idea what it is but it's spicy ina way that is completely unlike anything else I've ever tasted. I generally don't make a broth for my nabes, other than tossing in a big piece of kombu when I fire up the pot, but just let the solid ingredients add the flavor to the water. I'l need to try more broth-oriented versions when autumn rolls around. I have this great tabletop nabe pot made by Zojirushi. It looks sort of like a flattened rice cooker - maybe and inch and a half deep and 10 inches wide with a removable pan (for the nabe) that sits on a wide solid heating element, Great for maintaining a nice slow simmer and it makes a fantastic risotto pan as well.
  9. I find that I now hit Sur la Table more often as I work next door to it and they give a 15% professional food worker's discount, which is enough to make a lot of their prices more reasonable.
  10. Vashon Island is good for picking blackberries. A friend and I once picked nearly 20 pounds in an afternoon just pullingover from the road wherever we saw good bushes.
  11. Placebo

    Dinner! 2004

    I ate the currants plain - so nummy. In fact, demolished would be a better term than atre. I had planned to mainly use them in cooking, as you said, like cranbverries. Took a few out to nibble on and before I knew it they were gone. Must get more on Wednesday.
  12. Placebo

    Dinner! 2004

    Take-out Kimchee Chige (in this case a soup of kimchee, beef andthick glass noodles) with varuious little side dishes and fresh local organic currants
  13. There are home tandoors that can be purchased. I recall seeing some web pages a year ago or so showint the installetion of one. Looking.... This guy set up a tandoor in his back yard. There's a list of links to places that sell tandoors and tandoor liners on his Books and Contacts page.
  14. Placebo

    Tungba

    When I spent some time in Nepal, one of my favorite evening meals was a plate of momos and a mug of tungba. Tungba is essentially a fermented millet drink, served by combining the fermented millet and hot water in a mug and then sipping it through a straw made to filter out the millet grains. You can generally refill the mug 2 or 3 times before needing to change out the millet. The taste is reminiscent of sake. I've not seen the stuff outside of Nepal and am wondering about trying to make it. The descriptions I've seen have essentially been to soak the millet in water put it in a burlap sack and leave it in the closet for a month. I spoke with the owner of a local Nepali restaraunt who was talking about making some but apparently the millet here is all wrong and I imagine the cost of shipping it out is rather prohibitive (as, I suspect, are Washington's wacky likker laws). I'd love to try my hand at making the stuff but am not really sure where to begin. Any thoughts?
  15. Oh. My. God. Is this limited to happening on certain days of the week? I'm totally game for giving it a go. Hell, I already make product I won't get to taste in it's final form for a year. [edited for spelling]
  16. I tend to buy from Don & Joe's in the market as I work a block away and their stuff always look sbetter than the meat at the supermarket. I shopped at Crystal until they closed as they tended to have slightly better prices. When I worked on the East Side I shopped at the Golden Steer right on the Bellevue/Redmond border.
  17. Also, I'm trying to start learning more about which products at which stands come from their own farms or other specialized sources and which come from Charlie's Producs as I'd rather get from the former than the latter. I'm pretty certain that Frank's doesn't have a farm of their own though I think they do get some things in from other specialized sources while I believe that most of their goods are from Charlie's. I believe that Sosio's has a farm as, I think, does Stilnovich.
  18. Vivace is excellent. Also, Cafe Zoka, in Greenlake, roasts some good stuff on site and Heinz Public Market on Eastlake is excellent. Victrola, in 15th, is now starting to roast their own beans on premesis as well. Any of these will likely be better than Vita.
  19. I've become a huge fan of Rogue Creamery's Oregonzola, though their other blues are quite good as well. I also quite like Bingham Hill's Sheepish Blue (a sheep's milk blue cheese). Yum. Just the other night I soaked some fairly fresh morels in a bit of lillet to soften them up (they'd dried a bit on display at the market before I bought em), slit em down the side, stuffed each with a little bit of gorgonzola and baked them until the gorg melted. Delicious though you need to be careful about how much gorg to use or it'll overpower the mushroom taste.
  20. I tend to buy my fruit at Stilnovich (on the corner of Pike St and Pike Place, kitty corner from the fish throwers) and my vegetables at Sosio's. I got some excellent morels there the other day that I stuffed with a little gorgonzola and baked. Mm... If only the fresh porcinis were priced a bit better (though their price has dropped quite a bit over the last week or so).
  21. The ice cream isn't quite out yet but should be available within a week or two. Addtionally, today we've released some new cafe foods. There's breadsticks, made with our flagship cheese, that are quite tasty and garlicky; a bread and curd salad along the lines of a panzanella that I've not yet had a chance to taste; and a gazpacho that I think is really fantastic (I'm eating some right now, in fact). We've also gotten in some new cheeses over the last couple of months, including a very tasty parmesan by Fiscalini and Black Creek Buttery, which is a cow-goat-sheep mix. I can't really distinguish the goat in it but it's a really delicious cheese. Perhaps I should arrange a little egullet tour/tasting type event for our local cheese-o-philes.
  22. Placebo

    Making Cheese

    Yes, I'm still working on training materials for the retail staff regarding cheese cultures. In general, if you aren't sure what you're looking for, culture-wise, it's probably best to either startt with a kit or take home one of the books, pick out something you'd like to try and then come back for the supplies. The thing is that the cultures are pretty generic and most of what you need to worry about is in the making progres. You'd probably use the same cultures (if you're using New England Cheesemaking supplies) for jack, cheddar, havarti and a bunch of others with the differences being largely in what you do with the milk and curds as you make the cheese. There are specialized cultures for things like buttermilk, yogurt, fromage blanc and chevre, but most other cheeses you're likely to try at home will simply use either thermophilic of mesophilic cultures. For anything more specific you would probably need to move to professional grade cultures and their suppliers. In any case, I'd be happy to try and answer any further questions you have on cheesemaking processes. Buying the book was the right move and is probably what I would have suggested had I been here at the time (being one of the "cheese officials" and such).
  23. Placebo

    Making Cheese

    We have cheese-making supplies (cultures, hoops, etc) at Beecher's and you can always order them from www.cheesemaking.com as well. You may be able to get Smith Farms products via the Pike Place Creamery. We ordered our first few rounds of cream through them before we started having it delivered directly to our door. I'm currently on the hunt for goat and sheep milk for home cheese projects myself.
  24. Placebo

    Making Cheese

    Smith Brothers may also sell a non-homogenized milk, and if so it may be orderable through the Pike Place Creamery (the creamery gets stuff from them already, I believe).
  25. I love the Market Grill - everything they make is sublime. For cheaper eats I like a sausage sammich at Uli's (also in the Market). Tried one of the Louisiana Hots today - it was indeed very hot - deelicious.
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