carswell

As several have suggested, steam or parboil the whole potatoes until they're just cooked through. Then quarter them and brown the quarters in the skillet. If you're roasting them in a moderate oven, you can forego the precooking. Just be sure to turn them a few times during the process.

I dunno about covering the skillet after browning. Seems counterintuitive. Potatoes are largely water and they release a lot of it when heated. By covering the pan, you create a humid environment in which they cook, to some degree, by steaming. Steam and crisp do not mix. If anything you should try it the other way around: with cover on to cook the spuds through, then with cover off and heat raised to brown. Or cook the potatoes in a steamer until just done, then quarter them and brown the quarters in the skillet.

Um. You forgot to mention pinot noir. Goes with everything, you know. And barbera? Sure. But I thought we were talking about fine wines. <ducking>

Exhibit A (from Hugh Johnson's Pocket Encyclopedia of Wine):

Agree with Behemouth about the cheese being the likely culprit. FWIW, a few years ago I played around with adding cheese to spätzle batter as part of a cook-off in which the contestants were limited to using goat cheese. The only cheese that produced a desirable texture was chèvre frais, the fresh (i.e. unaged) stuff in logs that seems like it's only a step away from yogurt. The contest's tight deadline didn't leave much time for tinkering with recipes, though, so don't take this as anything more than a data point.

Less flavourful? Yeah. But it's a powerfully flavoured oil to begin with. The heat also alters the flavour a little, though it still tastes good and the smell alone is worth the price of admission. In the end, you're best off not cranking up the heat any higher than medium to avoid denaturing the oil more than necessary. Also, there are walnut oils and walnut oils. I usually buy Finesse brand nut oils in metal cans and, before plunking down my hard-earned cash, I check the pull date printed on the bottom.

Since we're now talking about sweet recipes, one of my favourite uses for the stalks is in late spring, when the rhubarb is cheap and the first cherries of the season are expensive: rhubarb and cherry clafoutis. Just take your regular cherry clafoutis recipe, replace half the cherries with rhubarb cut into cherry size chunks, up the sugar a little and flavour the batter with a bit of vanilla.

Besides the other problems mentioned above, the O series glasses make wine less visually appealing. When you hold the glass, your hand blocks your view of the wine or the amount of light entering it. When you set the glass down, you look down at the wine and through it to the surface on which the glass is sitting. Stemmed glasses allow for more play of light and less visual interference from, say, the checkered blue and white tablecloth in a Greek restaurant or the black granite countertops in a well-heeled wine lover's desinger kitchen; they literally put the wine above it all, take it to a higher level.

Hmm. montrealinfo.com has it as initial cap only. No listing yet on Canada411. What about the food? Market-driven French fusion? (Plus ça change...) edit: Since the address is 1077 Drummond and the phone number 934-1077, what do you bet that the decca stands for ten? Only problem is that it should be spelled deca (as in decalitre, decade, decagon, decalogue, decahedron, etc.). Decca is a long-range navigation system. edit: It appears there's no space between the decca and the 77 — Decca77 or DECCA77, as the case may be — which lends credence to my hypothesis. Damn. I was hoping it was named after a steroid.

Is the name actually all caps or is jamiemaw just yelling at us? And what's the story behind the name, anyway? Sounds like a new steroid or an old record label.

Even if the device works, in the end it's simpler and cheaper if the wine isn't corked to begin with. Cork is dead. Long live the screwcap! By the way, according to this discussion on the WLDG, it may not be necessary to invest €40 in a TCA-removal device, as a simple baggie or ziplock bag will do the trick. I'm suspicious of the claims but am willing to keep an open mind, and look forward to doing a little experimentation. So, here's hoping a corked bottle comes my way soon! (That's a first and I'm praying that it's not my remaining bottle of the '83 Pichon-Lalande.)

The Bosao's a great buy. With a forecast high of 26ºC (and that's at the airport; downtown will be a few degrees warmer), you're best off sticking those three bottles of Perdrix in the fridge. It'd be a shame to "cook" what has become a vanishingly rare commodity.

Interesting adaptation. I've never used walnut oil as a roasting medium; will have to give it a try. Now that you have the ingredients on hand (make sure you store the oil in the fridge, btw), you owe it to yourself to give the classic version a shot: Peel, thinly slice, rinse and dry some smallish (tennis ball sized) new potatoes. Heat some walnut oil in a skillet and sauté the potatoes until brown on all sides. Season with a tiny grating of nutmeg. Off the heat and just before serving, shower with a hachis of minced garlic, chives and parsley. Spangle with some sea salt and serve. A variation on that theme is to steam baby new potatoes until just done; let the potatoes cool, then quarter them; sauté in walnut oil until crisp and golden and season as just described. Since posting my earlier report, I've learned that, like Le P'tit Plateau and La Girondine, Anjou-Québec uses moulard legs for their cryovaced confit. In other words, the top three confits in the survey are made from moulard ducks. Kinda cinches it, eh? Don't forget the wine. Not only does it cut the richness and slake your thirst, it counterbalances the ill effects of the fat. Would I kid you?

CBC: Bar owners fuming over proposed smoking ban Right. Of course, Ottawa smokers desperate to light up while imbibing could hop across the river to Hull (aka Ottawa's ashtray). Ms. Langelier doesn't say whether she thinks we're going to see smokers' runs to Plattsburgh, Derby Line and Edmundston...

Chimneys are great and if anything they work better with lump charcoal than with briquettes. So, it's great to hear you're still open to the idea of a non-gas grill. That said, I'd strongly advise looking at something other than a kettle; I don't understand the Webermania that's rampant in North America these days. Also, before acquiring a charcoal burner, make sure you have ready access to a purveyor of charcoal and a place to store a couple of bags at home; if there's anything worse than running around town trying to find charcoal, it's discovering at the last minute that you don't have enough on hand to cook dinner.

You'll find an extended discussion of the grills here. For grilling, nothing beats lump charcoal. The advantages of propane are convenience, less mess and, if the barbecue comes with a side burner, the possibility of high-BTU stir-frying. A longtime Weber user, I will not buy another one when my kettle dies (or maybe I should say "if," for the things are extremely well built). To quote myself in the earlier thread: Am pleased to have since read that both Jeffrey Steingarten and David Rosengarten are of the same opinion.

In the FWIW department, www.saq.com just got a mostly cosmetic makeover. I wonder whether the Bill 101 types are going to raise a stink about the word English appearing top centre on every French page. And a heads-up. As discussed recently on the wine forum, Kim Crawford's flagship Marlborough (New Zealand) suavignon blanc has suddenly shown up en masse at the SAQ. Product code: 10327701. The saq.com listing says it's the 2004 but so far wattacetti and I have only found the 2003 (please give a shout if you spot the 2004; it would be interesting to do a side-by-side comparison). Provided you like the style, which I've heard one hardcore Europhile dismiss as Fresca, it's good stuff: lemon-lime nose with a hint of jalapeno, bright and juicy on the palate with a crisp finish. The overall impression is much like biting into a piece of fruit. Very similar to, if lacking a bit of the zing of, the early Cloudy Bays that caused wine lovers the world over to sit up and take notice 15 years ago. Packaged in an elegant bottle with a screwcap, it's a great aperitif wine and is tailor made for accompanying cool summer salads and seafood dishes. The 2004, part of LCBO's April 30 release (along with KC's pinot gris, chard, merlot and rosé...), reportedly flew off the shelves at $19.95. Given the thousands of bottles in stores on Montreal island, someone at the SAQ obviously thinks the same thing's going to happen here, especially as the SAQ's list price is a way cool $16.95.

There's very little left on the island. With four bottles, the Jean-Talon Station store looks like it might be your best bet. As always, give a call before making a special trip, wherever you go; just cuz www.saq.com says they have it doesn't mean they do. A bottle of the '95 Reserve opened last summer was disappointing. Not bad but lacking the wow factor of the bottles opened years earlier. One of the knocks against New World pinots is that they don't benefit from extended aging. The '95 certainly didn't disprove it.

My experience parallels ademello's. I'm a longtime fan of Coldstream Hills and have nothing but respect for James Halliday, their founder and guiding light. I bought a bottle of the 2002 pinot noir not long after it was released and found it quite good. I bought a second bottle in March during the sale referred to at the top of this page and found it strange. Cloudy, like you mention, unbalanced and beety flavoured, almost a caricature of a New World pinot. I've since noticed a couple of bottles that were leaking under the capsule. My guess, like Mr. A's, is quality control issues. That's why I mentioned upthread that the 2003 Domaine des Perdrix Bourgogne blew the 2002 Coldstream Hills out of the water. Cloudiness in a wine is not necessarily a defect, though I don't recall that first bottle of the 2002 being cloudy. And to be fair, I should point out that if any wine is affected by bottle/travel shock, it's pinot noir; usually you're best off letting it rest for a month or two after the kind of rough handling it receives during transport. Still, I think your bottle was probably defective; if you have more than 2/3 of it left, stick a cork in it and return it to the SAQ for a refund.

My guess is savoury, one of whose German names is Saturei. In France, savoury is often used in lentil dishes; one of my favourites sounds similar to your friends', except it also includes carrot chunks and garlic. (As others have noted, the bacon should be browned. I brown bacon chunks in a bit of olive oil, remove the bacon, cook the onions in the fat, add the carrots and garlic and cook a couple of minutes more, then add the lentils and herbs, usually bay and winter savoury.) You can subsititute thyme if you don't have any savoury lying around.

Last week we had an interesting discussion on this very topic. See Savory Rhubarb Recipes?. edit: And, yes, you can make ice cream, sherbet and ices with it. Or swirl some rhubarb compot into just churned vanilla or strawberry ice cream for rhubarb ripple.

I also wonder about the effect of machine skinning. Agreed. If your skate is pristine smelling when raw, the chances it will develop an ammonia odour when cooked are slim. So, it's your safest bet. But a slight ammonia odour can be dealt with and doesn't mean the fish isn't fresh. Citing Eduard Pomiane, naguerre, for one, mentions it upthread. Yvonne Young Tarr does so in The Great East Coast Seafood Book. I also have a vague memory of reading about it in a food science book, maybe Harold McGee; his new edition of On Food and Cooking is on my wish list, so I'm afraid I can't check it. And of course the Web has references galore. For example: As I understand it, acrolein is toxic if inhaled, not (or less so) if ingested. And the amounts released when making a brown or black butter are small. To be on the safe side, turn on your vent when preparing it. But bear in mind that people have been making and eating beurre noisette for decades if not centuries with no ill effects.

You're drawing a correlation that doesn't necessarily exist. A skate caught one day ago whose flesh contained a high amount of urea might well have a stronger ammonia smell than a skate caught four days ago but skinned immediately and expertly. And presumably at some point all the urea in the flesh breaks down, meaning the amount of ammonia no longer increases. While I'm thankfully unfamiliar with Iceland's skata, the objectionable odour is surely more than just ammonia since the fish is allowed to rot or ferment or whatever for weeks. Sweden's urea-free surströmming, whole herring that are salted and left to ferment for weeks if not months, smells to high heaven. (People open the cans outdoors under running water and allow the open cans to breathe for a while before bringing them in so the smell can dissipate. And when they're brought in, you're supposed to sit close to a can for five minutes in order to kill your sense of smell. Then and only then do you begin eating.) Since the skata skate is unskinned, it's no surprise that ammonia is a big component of the smell. But that's not what we're talking about here.

There is a lot of misinformation flying about in this and the referred to thread (thanks, ludja, I can't believe I skipped it until now). First and foremost, as someone in that thread pointed out — not that participants seemed to notice — skates excrete urea, not urine, from their skin. Definition of urea from www.m-w.com: The ammonia smell in skate comes from the breakdown of urea into carbon dioxide and ammonia. This does not take days to occur. The smell is therefore not an indication that the flesh is decomposing or even past its "best before" date. What it most likely means is that skate was not skinned upon capture and that some of the skin's urea has leached into the flesh and broken down. And when that happens, brining the fish as one does with shark, poaching it in a vinegar solution and/or serving it with a sauce that includes vinegar and/or acrolein (formed when butter browns) effectively counteracts the ammonia. Most of the above information comes from my most trusted fishmonger, whom I just got off the blower with. And, by the way, he scoffs at the notion that ammonia is an indicator of decomposition. "Since when does decomposing fish smell like ammonia?" was more or less how he put it. "Cheese, yes. Fish, no." A number of websites support this view. This one, for example: How to prepare skate for cooking. You can find others (and, yes, ones that contradict it) by googling skate ammonia (include -hockey to refine the results). For what it's worth, it's also the position taken by Yvonne Young Tarr in her normally reliable The Great East Coast Seafood Book.

The French recently began allowing restaurant patrons to take home unfinished bottles. Here's a reference from Wine Business Online: The, uh, driving force behind the French move is to reduce the number of DUI arrests and accidents, the thinking being that if drivers can take the bottle home with them, they will be less inclinded to overdrink at the restaurant. Restaurateurs and winemakers support the measure because they fear a drop in restaurant wine sales in response to the DUI crackdown. Is the same reasoning being used to justify the Michigan law?