Bux

It certainly seems as if the magazine is changing. I thought it started to change when Ruth Riechl took over, but it still didn't seem to catch my attention. It will be interesting to see if it can get closer to the edge and still keep all that advertising. I find all that advertising affects how I see the magazine. It makes it harder to focus on the articles.

I had hot foie gras in Can Fabes some years back. It was exceptional. I'm hesitant to mention the Guía Campsa as I really don't have enough experience with it to know how reliable it is. Nevertheless, it lists four restaurants in Roses. El Bulli gets three "sols," their equivalent of stars. La Llar gets an "R" for recommended, a grade below a single sol. The Almadraba Park restaurant at Tony's hotel, gets a mention as does Flor de Lis where Chef Nikolaus Von Obstfelder offers "una cocina international" including "gambas en salsa pizzaiola."

By the way, we make omelets in a commerical aluminum pan. It's never used for anything else and is perfectly seasoned. If an omelet ever sticks, the pan gets a quick salt scrub and a little oil. I found I could not season an anodized aluminum pan and that they stick as much as a stainless lined pan or maybe more. I don't like the dark color as I can't judge the degree of browning nor sauce reduction as well.

I suppose I will chime in with my preferred method. I have a commercial range with 15000 btu burners. There are more powerful residential burners these days. I roast the peppers whole on the range top putting them directly on the grill that holds the pots and pans. I wash the peppers first and then I oil them. I find the oil seems to carry the heat, lets them char more evenly and above all, the uncharred bits seem to come off easier. I turn the peppers a lot while the skins are charring and don't do more than I can watch at one time. When pretty well blackened, I put the peppers in a bag which I close tightly. Five or ten minutes later, I take out the pepper, remove the stem and core and quarter the peppers on the ribs. I then scrape off the blackened skin. I'm always washing my hands and the knife, so there's always some water going to come in touch with the peppers, but I try not to wash the peppers themselves and just scrape them clean. I usually heat some minced or sliced garlic in olive oil at a low temperature and add this to the bowl with the peppers and then add some good extra virgin olive oil which I've not heated. Back to Jim's chimney. I think unsanitary is not the word to use for something that's been sterilized by the heat. Tommy, charcoal briquets are loaded with petrochemicals. If someone were to use pure charcoal, I would have no qualms. After contact with briquets, the peppers might merrit washing however.

Should I assume you're headed towards a professional career cooking in a restaurant as in chef = chief of the kitchen brigade, or do you just see "chef" as term synonymous to good cook? I ask relative to a recent thread, "Chef" -- Who is? Who ain't? It's an important question as we have many culinary students and professionals here on eGullet. As I've mentioned on the other thread, I'm not a big fan of anodized aluminum as a cooking surface. Others disagree with me and I haven't had all that much experience with these surfaces as I didn't enjoy the using the one pan I bought. Thus I would choose the All Clad. In fact I have several All Clad pots and pans. I don't care about how the used pots look and don't put them in the dish washer. Thus I buy the plain aluminum exterior with stainless interior. I have a couple of pieces of non stick cookware. I was suspicious of their usefulness and didn't get good ones. Once again that may have hampered my appreciation for them. I think they serve a good function in any kitchen, as long as they stay nonstick.

All good questions. Push a crappy product here and you're likely to be dead meat. Our knowledgeable members would probably cut the product to shreds online when they saw it. On the other hand, get a good tool in the hands of a member who's pleased with the results and the price and you'll find it recommended all over. I imagine eGullet members to be the kind of people their friends all ask about what to buy and where to eat when it comes to food and dining. I think sales to eGullet members may be more important than the numbers might indicate. It's just a thought and you're right in pointing out that any offer would find competition in the posts by members of onlines sales. That kind of communication amomg members is certainly one of our strengths.

I was suggesting that eGullet offered a good market for retailers to try and tap with a discount offer. I don't know if it's workable or worthwhile or not, but it's certainly ethical. My comment about discounts to professional cooks was more about a cook buying a piece of equipment whether for professional or home use, than about a restaurants acquisition of equipment. Actually, we should assume a professional is always buying equipment for professional use, even if that use will be in his apartment to test recipes. I'd also suggest that many members pay a premium for convenience. A serious cook who decides he has a real need for a piece of equipment may do a bit of comparison shopping, but quite often, he will want fairly immediate satisfaction of his need, especially if he has a dinner party coming up.

I'm glad to hear La Llar is excellent. I usually put a fair amount of faith in Michelin. While it's not infallible, it's what I resort to using when I don't have a personal recommendation and generally it's been fairly reliable. To a great extent my comment about foie gras is prompted by Roses' location by the sea where I'd be looking for places that featured sea food, although not necessarily exclusively. More personal reasons probably play a bigger part in my not wanting to look for foie gras in Spain. We had it twice in a row on our last trip. The first time my wife ordered it because a shopkeeper in town raved about a local restaurant's foie gras when recommending the restaurant and the second time it was part of a tasting menu. The first restaurant was a rather simple place where we ordered too much food and the foie gras was the dish we didn't finish in spite of being twice as expensive as any other dish we ordered. It wasn't that the dish wasn't good, it was that the other dishes, even the ones that we weren't sure we liked, were so much more interesting to us. It may sound offensively elitist or snobbish, but I'm afraid we've been over "foie gras-ed" in NY and France. I believe foie gras has more interest right now for Spanish chefs and diners. This is the odd situation where I'm less interested in eating what the locals eat, I suppose. In the second restaurant, a one star where we had the tasting menu, the foie gras was again one of the least interesting dishes although it did bear a granish that was distinctively Spanish to our taste and thus lent a sense of terroir. However here, every dish was interesting and loudly proclaimed "auteur" or España." This was at Las Rejas and although I waddled out of the restaurant in a stupor, I would have eaten a second portion of any, and maybe every, dish had it been offered. On the other hand, the French custom of a cheese course before dessert, is one I don't mind having in Spain. On the whole I'm seeing this in the more avant garde places serving haute cuisine and it seems more of an international custom. In NY, I'm quite content to have imported cheese, but in Spain, I like to have Spanish cheese. For the most part, Spanish cheeses may lend themselves to tapas better than the cheese tray. Torta del Casar is a prominent exception, but this may be changing in the same way that Spain's wine is changing. Spain is changing and while I worry its food will lose its sense of terroir, I am aware that these changes are what's bringing Spanish restaurants to the fore.

It appears it's the slaughterhouse that has to be certified, not the farm. It's all a little bit confusing. In any event, jambon bellota is not very cheap even in Spain. Most shops, or charcuterias, have cured pork products available from different suppliers and of different quality at different prices and the top prices are generally higher than I have ever seen for any ham sold in NYC. Thus it's not surprising that when real Bellota from Pata Negra pigs hits NYC, it will be very expensive. La Tienda sells the Palacio brand chorizo made in Spain, but made from pork raised in Denmark acording to Amanda Hesser (see article quoted above). That's the same brand I've seen in Gourmet Garage. They also have a pretty broad selection of both slicing and cooking chorizos made in the US. It's a far greater range of products than I've seen in NY since Casa Moneo (West 14th Street) closed up shop a long time ago. Casa Moneo sold a good brand of Cantimpalo slicing sausage. I have not found anything of that quality since in NYC, although I've better in Spain. I found the La Tienda web page entitled A Common Sense Guide to Spanish Chorizo Sausage to be informative on the subject of chorizo, although there's more to be said on the subject. I'd like to get my hands on some of the wild boar chorizo we saw in markets in Spain.

Lots of cookware shops offer professional discounts to restaurant cooks. Someone could tap into a nice market by offering that discount to eGullet members, perhaps.

Real Chorizo and authentic chorizo are questionable terms. In Spain, I've had a number of very different sausages that were all chorizos. As with many new world meanings for old world ways the word has different meanings in different parts of the world. (A Cajun andouille has next to nothing to do with a French andouille.) I gather that Mexican chorizos are quite different from Spanish ones. The east coast is more likely to see chorizos catering to a Puerto Rican, Dominican or Portuguese market (chorizo and chouriço respectively) and they're of style similar to most of those I've had in Spain. However, in Spain there are a number of chorizos made in large casings that are dried and designed to be sliced and eaten cold as well as the narrower chorizos that are meant to be used in cooking. Spain has some of the best tasting pork and cured meat products in the world and I'd not argue that any of the chorizos made in the US are of quite the same quality, but we've had serviceable sausages by that name made in Brookly and New Jersey. In NYC, I have no trouble finding them in a couple of delis in the area west of SoHo. It's been a Portuguese (as well as Italian) neighborhood for some time. I have also seen chorizos made in Spain for sale in a couple of markets including Gourmet Garage. I have not tried those. When I first read of Iberian hams being imported into the US, it turned out that the hams were cured in Spain but that the actual pigs were raised in Denmark. At the time, there were no hog farmers in Spain employing USDA inspectors. In order to import the final product, the meat must first be certified and then the product. Because I've yet to hear an update with news regarding pork raised in Spain which is certified by the USDA, I assume the "Spanish" chorizos sold here are also made from pigs raised outside of Spain and processed as sausages in Spain. I don't know where they might fall on anyone's scale of "real."

We walked by this amazing place the other day, and were once again reminded of its existence; it appeared particularly dive-ish against the backdrop of a rainstorm. I think our group might be tough enough to handle it. If Andy meant what he wrote this could be ideal. If it's the place I'm thinking of, we caught the end of a Knicks' playoff game some years back there. It seemed like a friendly place then. I don't recall a great choice in beer though -- maybe just Heinekin and the usual bar beers. We had just finished a meal at a nice restaurant in the area (now closed) and I wasn't having more than one beer anyway.

Spoilsport. Seriously, the waitresses are flirting back. My father flirted with the nurses all through his chemotherapy. Sometimes I think he enjoyed the hospital visits more than his bridge club where the older ladies flirted with him. And my wife doesn't mind if I flirt with the waitresses, as long as they're much younger than I am

How do you reconcile this truism with "a watched pot never boils"? I know people who can boil water but who can't cook.

Fat Guy just forwarded this link to me and asked if the story had been mentioned in this thead. Visa/MasterCard May have to Give Back Overseas Transaction Fees. The article is dated February 12, 2003, but although this is a subject I've followed closely, this is the first time I've heard about this ruling. "California Judge Ronald Sabraw made an initial ruling that Visa International and MasterCard International may have to return $500 million in fees charged to customers who used their credit cards while overseas." The "initial ruling did not find fault with the conversion fees or find violations of the Truth in Lending Act, but the judge did find that a California statue pertaining to deceptive practices was applicable to the case." I don't know if this has been appealed or if a final ruling has been made. I also don't know if the ruling is applicable only in California, but I suspect it's this is why some banks have re-examined their (deceptive) practices.

Too bad indeed. A site I once worked on, now announces quite empahatically that you can't enter unless you are using the latest version of Internet Explorer. While that almost guarantees you will see the site only as intended, it also guarantees the owners of the restaurant are excluding all those whose computers can't run the latest version of IE, or run other browsers for any number of reasons. The site is now focused on how it looks rather than communication of information, but it looks good to the owner on his machine and I assume he's pleased.

I WON'T contribute to that. Andy, if they buy you a Bud lite, I'll buy you a Bass. I thought you were in for a brewski, not Bass. At least make it a new world beer if you're going to go all serious on us.

Walking away from a pan on the stove is not cooking. A pan that will forgive walking away from the stove, is not particularly the best pan to use when you're paying 100% attention to your cooking.

Watch out. That kind of sarcasm is liable to get you a Corona.

"Gianduja refers not only to Piedmont's famous chocolate but to Piedmont's famous carnival mask. Gianduja the carnival character made his debut at the start of the 1800's thanks to the imagination of puppeteers Sales and Bellone in Asti, ... "click for more.

If you can get the price of a beer low enough, I might even buy one for Andy. If worse comes to worse, we can all chip in and buy him a glass of Bud lite so he doesn't leave thinking we're cheap. We're probably both in for Thursday evening.

So it's not a Honduran mole with Jamaican herbs?

Does Craft have a tasting menu? I know they've made changes in how their "carte" is arranged since I've been there.

I've preferred cooking in the tin lined copper than the stainless steel lined aluminum, that's for sure on two counts. I have one small anodized aluminum pan and I don't like the surface at all so I never looked further into the assets of anodized aluminum. I don't spend much time cleaning the outside of any pots I have and don't much care what they look like. The All Clad with the stainless exterior never interested me. I like the look of black iron and of anodized aluminum, but I rarely buy a pot on its looks. When I was younger, I used to like the kind of pots and pans that looked as if they were targets for the Museum of Modern Art collection. Nowadays I wonder why anyone thinks they can design a better looking pan that the traditional ones. Any change should be purely functional. And a plague on anyone who manufactures a pot with a handle that can burn or melt.

I Know some chefs who use a couple of copper pots, what seems like, all the time at home. Those damn things weigh more than some cast iron I have. The outsides of the pots are clean, but certainly not polished. We have a few very nice old copper pots and pans we never use. Two of them were purchased at Dehillerin in Paris in the sixties. They're less heavy weight than I might buy now, but copper is an amazing heat conductor even in comparison with aluminum. Another pot was a gift a friend found in the country. Unfortuantely, they predate the copper stainless technology and the tin linings are pretty well worn. The last time I looked into having them retinned again, we decided All Clad was a better investment. I have purchased some tin and have thought of doing the relining myself, but never find the time. I also wonder about consuming the tin that has to go in the food if it's wearing off.