Strange or hard-to-find foods that Tep should try

No one say "rattlesnake," by the way, because it costs like $60 a package.

And so-called "duck prosciutto," which I sort of want to hit a little for calling itself prosciutto, and then eat anyway.

Yep, we said Amish section :) Seriously, this place is huge. They're putting in a monorail to take people around the store.

A MONORAIL.

xp A MONOTRAIL!?

Because come on, skull keychain!

try and find a good cured spanish ham. they are sweet and delicious. and not very kosher, incidentally.

Bloomingfoods! Right? I don't know roads, but I think that must be it. I love it. I've been getting local apples there once a week, and nearly every time I go they have organic citrus they didn't have the time before ("pixie tangerines" this week, which are tangerines the size of golfballs, sweet and juicy but tarter than oranges).

Blair's hot sauces are pretty good -- I had those a lot in New Orleans, but that doesn't rule out buying some again.

When you say "a good cured Spanish ham," is it worth the extra bucks to get a whole (or whole piece) of ham and not slices? (I was tempted by a whole prosciutto last time, but I was on a budget, and that was at the front of the store.)

I'm not raining on your parade, damn you!

Gawk at the Wall of Beer.

They have fresh durian for $3.99 each, but I'm not gonna buy any.

Oh, and possibly this trip will also involve a meal at a West African restaurant, which I'm happy about. It's a very food-oriented trip, we've been discussing restaurant options etc.

Wuss.

Do you think they'd have Bolner's Fiesta spices? If so, THAT WOULD BE SO COOL. Especiall if they have the chili powder, garlic powder, cinnamon sticks, ground comino, and fajita seasoning. And whenever Mom makes her Lenten albondigas, she always uses their dried shrimp powder, or as their website lists, "shrimp, dried - ground".

Basically wensleydale with fruit = cheese for people who don't want to taste cheese.

mmmmmm oatcakes - T do you fry yours in butter and then put a fried egg on top too?

Was it a Wensleydale or something else that someone mentioned on another thread as having ginger in it? Dude, a cheese with ginger in it would have to be tried, even at the risk of epicurean atrocity. It's cheese and ginger!

Knorr caldo de pollo -- they used to have that at the Vietnamese-run Latin market in the black German neighborhood I lived in, I believe, which makes me even more curious if JJ's has it (that was a strange market, home of the mole sauces that cannot be opened). The Nestle Abuelita I know they have, cause I almost got some last time and then didn't.

Bolner's Fiesta spices. I will look.

I've never had oatcakes proper or not, but Leetoaster Lancashire -- or Lancashire in general -- sounds like something to look for. I've yet to have a British cheese that wasn't worth buying.

No one finds it funny enough when I go outside and shout "turkeys are hitting the ground like bags of wet cement!"

Is it legal to eat koala?

I came up with the idea of koala tacos a while back and cannot exorcise the image. So if you want to bring it to fruition...

(I probably wouldn't be able to make it out of the store without some lambic, I think I could almost measure my disposable income in how many bottles of kriek lambic I let myself buy.)

I'll look for Quebec microbrews. I know they have a Canadian section on the wall of beer, don't remember if Quebec is segregated within it or not.

We've also got a Rochefort which is something mental like 12%

We had another one too, from Alsace with a swingtop and art nouveau graphics which is delicious, but I can't for the life of me remember it's name, begins with a d though

Ajvar is this spicy eggplant/roasted red pepper spread/sauce that goes well on toast and other things, like pasta.

Although on saying that my new chilli powder (I'm too sodding LAZY for real actual chillis) is a f#cking STONKER. Wooosht.

I don't have a digital camera exactly, but I have a phone cam. Some things/colors/sizes of objects come through better than others.

Today, as soon as I'm done with laundry and this chapter, I'm going out to buy a bigger cooler. How's that for shopping commitment?

(The one I brought last time was big enough to put stuff in, but not big enough for stuff + ice -- it was still below freezing outside, so it didn't matter, but we're in the 40s and 50s now).

I can't quite figure out how they can do business, since so much of the fresh product has to be moved quickly -- which is why it's so hard to find to begin with. My theory -- unless Ohio just has a huge concentration of foodies with money to burn -- is that enough people go out of their way to come in and get the big ticket items that the profit margin on those pays for everyone else. (Cause I mean, I'm making a big deal out of this and everything, but it's spectacularly unlikely that I'd spend more than $300, so it's not guys like me who keep them running.) They have bottles of balsamic vinegar that cost hundreds of dollars, white truffle oil, things like that that make an astronomical amount of money relative to the minuscule shelf space they take up.

But dude, Chris, there are plenty of great things about Florida this time of year :) And in a month, it'll be warm enough that I'd think there'd be some farmers' markets and fresh citrus.

It happened cause I thought I remembered reading something on the web about someone doing that, but now I can't find it.

It's better than the McGriddle.

Cheese would totally fuck it up, though. (Also, you have to use the bun as a panini press, to compress the donuts down so that the thing isn't six inches high.)

Tamarind kimchee (I suppose that doesn't count)
Jamon iberico, they were out; but I got bresaola and prosciutto
Scrapple with anchovies, sorry Jess
Durian, because I was talked out of it
Koala tacos
Any Mexican stuff; the place is huuuuuge, and I somehow took a wrong turn or missed an aisle or something and never hit the Mexican section (although I did hit the Spanish section)

I found my Bonny Doon freisa frizzante, though! And so much else.

There's no durian steward, but there is a sign saying king of fruits, blah blah blah, potent odor, blah blah blah, not for everyone, la dee da.

I'll type up what I got in a moment, I saved the receipt rather than try to rely on memory of what's been put in the refrigerator and cupboards.

At Mister Table (they call it Sur La Table, I call it Mister Table, it's a kitchen store):
Two El Rey chocolate bars
Fleur de Sel caramels
Demiglace. I've always made it myself, but I decided to try the premade kind, which gets good reviews; it's much easier, and in some senses cheaper.

At Wild Oats, an organic grocery store:
Jalapeno cheetos. They're not Cheetos brand, they're some organic thing, but dude, jalapeno cheetos, that's all I'm saying.

Orangina rouge = num, but lots of people I know don't like it.

the pigs ears = good call, boil (iirc) then fry with breadcrumbs and serve with the mustard or even spread with mustard then dip in breadcrumbs and fry - that could be the winner

Hope you ebnjoy the westmalle

Woodpecker cider though??????? that's rough stuff dude

The Orangina rouge is incrediby incredibly good and I wish I'd bought twenty of them.

Boil the pigs' ears first? That makes sense. This will be interesting. As with the pigs' feet last time, I've promised to do this sometime when I have the apartment to myself.

I don't think the sour oranges are Sevilles -- they're Latin American, tend to be used in Cuban cooking for marinades; I haven't seen them sold as anything but sour oranges or bitter oranges.

We spent two and a half hours there :)

There's a Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall recipe for pigs ears, I'll try and dig it out at home tonight

It's from
'The River Cottage Cookbook' by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (my hero!).

2 pig's ears, simmered gently with the head (or without, I suppose - but the
simmering should be done in well flavoured stock, for around 2 and a half
hours!), then removed from the liquid and cooled, with any hairs removed.
2-3 tablespoons of English mustard (Colmans is yer only man!)
Fresh breadcrumbs for coating
50g melted butter.

Slice the ears into strips. Using a pastry brush, give them a light coating
of mustard. Roll them in the breadcrumbs, and brush with the melted butter.
Roast in a 220 degree C oven for 30 - 40 mins. Serve with tartare sauce, or
plain, as pre-meal nibbles - beautifully crunchy - llike a slightly more
chewy crackling.

That's a great list of tasty stuff though. *dribble* You appear to get wacky Cadbury's things that we don't even have here!

(Woodpecker cider - that's like us getting excited about PBR or something).

The pigs' ears I am very excited about. I'll probably have them with sriracha. I have nearly everything with sriracha or Tabasco.

Just out of curiosity -- the non-American cider section was small, so I might not ever be able to use the info -- what are the great bottled ciders, for you guys?

But yeah, Liz speaks the truth. If you ever find Snakecatcher cider from the New forest - get the rough stuff and take the next day off work

Mm, I can't wait til I can finally get up to Borough Market. I want to buy a tortilla press for Matt from the coolchile.co.uk people, although they seem to have been out of stock via the website for months.

But I have a honeycomb thing! Now I forget if it's Nestle or Cadbury. I've put the chocolate away since it's still Lent.

(Although I allowed myself a Vimto.)

Milk & plain chocolate blend with rum-flavoured raisins. Yum.

HONEYCOMB?????????????????????????????????????

Okay, I didn't find all of them (hrm), but the Aero honeycomb is an Aero with little "honeycomb" pieces in it, like in a Cadbury Crunchie. I haven't had it yet. Saving it for post-Easter.

Cadbury stuff -- Cadbury Marble (milk and white chocolate filled with praline, label tags it as "unashamed luxury"), Cadbury Dairy Milk Tiffin (milk chocolate with raisins and biscuits), Cadbury Crunchie. Possibly the girlfriend took some of the others.

The unidentified LAZZ above: Lazzaroni Amaretti di Saronno, a bittersweet chocolate bar with Amaretti di Saronno cookie crumbles in it.

Also, I think I forgot to list the osso bucco. Tonight's dinner is either osso bucco or kangaroo grillades. Haven't decided which is for tonight and which is tomorrow's. Lunch is white asparagus roasted ala N., bresaola with kalamata olive oil, and leftover wild mushroom risotto from Friday night.

Aimee -- I'm sitting there with pork ears in the cart, having just been talked out of durian, looking at $200 vinegars, and I ask my friend who lives there but grew up in New York, "So I'm gonna look for Drake's cakes, think they'll have em?" and he just shook his head sadly. And they didn't.

Must. Find. Aero. Honeycomb.

fuckers.

Still one of my favorite cocktail recipes: scoop a passion fruit into a glass, break the pulp up a little, add a shot of tequila, top off with champagne.

A large sushi preparation area, which unless some of the space around it is going to go to something else, is larger than some sushi restaurants I've been in;

"The Olive Pit," which is a large salad bar except that everything is olives, instead of mucking around with lettuce and croutons (maybe this would mean I could find pitted Nicoise olives);

A Starbuck's (they have a coffee area already, which also sells store-made gourmet chocolates and cold sodas from the British, American, and Latin American sections, but it doesn't sell espresso drinks, just straight-up coffee).

Pineapple-Flower Salad

One baby pineapple, ends cut off, peeled, cored, cut into eighths from end to end. Use a cautious knife so you take off only as much as you need to, and do not hesitate to nibble on the pieces you've trimmed away.

On non-stick pan (preferably) over medium-high heat, sear (without oil or nothing, even if it's a stick pan) pineapple spears until golden on two sides. Refrigerate to get em cold again.

Put in bowl atop small heap of washed and dried baby arugula, garnished with edible flowers. Add a little salt, a little pepper.

Kangaroo grillades and basmati rice

Grillades are pounded medallions of meat, traditionally served over grits.

Wash and pound kangaroo medallions until even in thickness. Dredge in a little flour with a little salt, a little pepper. Add to hot skillet with oil or butter, brown both sides. Add the chopped white parts of two knob onions, and one chopped maroon carrot. Reduce heat to medium and stir until onions begin to transluce. Add minced garlic and a toothbrushing-amount of tomato paste.

Stir half a minute, and add meat broth of the kind of your choice, about 3/4 cup chopped tomato, and a bit of cayenne. Cook for an hour or so, covered, on low heat. Add a bit of marjoram right at the end, and serve over basmati rice.

hahaha in quebec "pepper" is a somewhat-derogatory term for the quebecois! because they like pepsi so much!

(anglos are tétes de carrés--squareheads!)

so my friend is an exotic fruit fiend--he's travelled around and written articles on various amazing-sounding fruits (the miracle bean, a little thing that you suck on and then you bite into a lemon and it tastes SWEET, is one of my favourites)--anyway, this guy was working on a pitch for a documentary series about exotic fruit and the people who hunt for such things.

so he's in new york and he & his documentarian friend have this exotic-fruit-tasting party at said friend's swanky 5th ave. apartment. they produce some durians and cut them open, releasing the expected aroma.

now, some dowager in a neighbouring apartment gets a whiff of the durian, thinks it's a gas leak, and panics. she calls the building's owner, who's in miami. he calls the super, who drives down from queens. the super calls the gas company, who send a guy over. this whole motley crew goes door to door in the apartment building until they show up at my friend's friend's door. they enter and the dowager marches in, goes straight up to a scented candle sitting on the coffeetable (the candle isn't burning) and says "THIS IS IT."

Them dried bananas are kind of nice, but bejaysus! how can they be charging $33 for 4 packs? Even in the wanky healthfood shop in Crouch End they're only about 50p a pack. Very chewy, and I don't know what to do with them apart from eating straight like other dried fruit.

Other thing you can do with them - say to unsuspecting visitors "Look - I'm eating a piece of poo!".

Fino honey: very good stuff.

Didn't otherwise cook today, particularly, because of taking too many pills for a headache. Tried vinegar chicken with dried crushed jalapeno instead of Tabasco peppers or the usual "crushed red peppers"; didn't like it as much, the jalapeno flavor didn't come through (although the peppers smell great) and it lacked the heat of the other versions.

Am making my own bacon, more or less (it's salt-cured, not smoked). It's sitting in the fridge in what is now a dark-red brine, because of the liquid the heavily seasoned salt-sugar combo has leeched from the meat.

Tomorrow, osso bucco. Nothing spectacularly unusual there, although I'll use some of the knob onions and maroon carrots.

The girlfriend is in love with those fleur de sel caramels, which is sensible.

please send homemade bacon & fleur-de-sel caramels.

I smell a Krispy Kreme Burger sequel.

And I really thought I had read about them somewhere. I'm still pretty sure I did, I just can't find it. It's not like I said, "You know what? Fuck 'blueberry duck,' I'm going all out, donutburger. Donutgoddamnburger, who's with me?" I just brought it up and everyone else said, "Yeah ... you should eat one."

(Also: bwahahaha.)

(Possibly also because there is no Krispy Kreme in Bloomington -- weirdly, and I think I posted about this before, there is no donut place at all other than the very small 'Cresent Donuts' which only has a couple donuts anyway. No Dunkin Donuts, no Krispy Kreme, no Mr Donut, no Hey Man Donuts, no Boom! Bavarian, no Kruller King, no Doughnut Haus, no Swoosh & Sons Intercalary Donut Palace, no Donut Dauphin: The Confectioner in Exile, no Great American Donut, no The Peoples' Donut Factory, no Glorious Donut Revolution, no Donuts Of Thermidor Marching Across The Field, no damn chain donut shops at all.)

(So we had to do it while we could.)

(*may cause bovine spongiform encephalomyelitis)

I don't know if I'm making saffron risotto, though. I have some good saffron which Penzey's accidentally gave me for free, and I can get arborio rice at the store today, so I might.

(Plus the donuts for the Krispyburger were still hot, which I think was key. Maybe.)

(But yeah, I don't in general bemoan the lack of donut shops, I can live with it.)

But Fino honey on a bit of bread with a bit of that double devon cream butter? Damn and goddamn, it's good. It'd probably be better on fresh-made pitas, but I don't see those for sale anywhere here.

You. Are. Killing. Me.

With honeycomb.

It's not exactly Crunchie-like even in its honeycombositousness, though; Crunchies are like chocolate-covered sponge candy, and the honeycomb bits in Aero Honeycomb is more ... I don't know, dense? Coarse? I'm not sure how to explain. The texture is different even apart from the "scattered throughout an Aero" vs "straight-up with chocolate" factor.

The osso bucco was osso goodo. Marrow on bread, yay, with a side of roast meat in tomato gravy. Didn't make risotto, just basmati rice.

Next Jungle Jim's aftershock is pork roast marinated in citrus, which is one of my specialties. It'll marinate awhile, I probably won't actually cook it until Saturday.)

She wants it! I'm just helping.

(xp)

1 pork roast. You know those loin roasts covered in seasoning, with the fluid injection to keep them from drying out? Yeah, never buy them. The overbrining makes them spongy to make up for the leanness. You don't even need a loin roast, really, although it's fine if you want one. I usually use a more marbled roast and then trim the fat off when I'm done.

Juice from 2 sweet lemons, 2 sour oranges, 2 blood oranges, 2 honey tangerines.

1 tablespoon or so dried crushed jalapeno. Slightly less of Mexican oregano. About twice as much kosher salt and brown sugar.

Combine juice with dry ingredients. Pour over pork roast in bowl just big enough to hold it all. Add a little water if you need to to keep the pork covered. Brine for 24 hours in the fridge; flip over at some point.

Remove from brine. Pat dry. Take about a tablespoon or two of brown sugar again and pat it all over the roast. Roast at 350 until done -- 2 hours, maybe, depends how big the roast is etc.

Good for sandwiches, good with mustard, good with vinegary things; this could be adapted nicely to pulled-pork barbecue.

lately I've cooked the same belly pork recipe a couple of times (and need to do it a couple more to get it right), where I crush up garlic and fennel seeds, mix with oil and salt and pepper, then slather all over the flesh side of a lump of belly pork, leave it for just 30 minutes or so and then score the skin, then whack it in a hot oven for 15 minutes before turning it down and roasting for another hour or so - crackling on top, gooey and fennelly on the bottom. Then de-glaze the pan with sherry for a nice thin gravy. I chucked a couple of roughly chopped onions in the bottom for a tastier gravy last time.

It's from the Moro cookbook, which is a real winner for Spanish and middle eastern stuff

Wooo, roasted pork belly. I have half of the pork belly I bought, in the freezer (the other half is baconating or baconizing or whichever is the coolest verb for "turning into bacon.") I may try that.

oh my god those butters are making me to drool.

Tell me about it -- and it's really getting too warm to mail-order butter, I'm sure they'd have to ship it on ice and it'd be ridiculously expensive.

But sheep's milk butter! I remember wondering why there wasn't any, when I got into sheep's milk cheeses, and realizing I never see sheep's milk itself, either, and figured there were reasons for it. Apparently not enough of them.

Those Danish flavored butters I got? Very good, especially since they're barely more expensive than Land O' Lakes etc. But the Double Devon Cream butter is what I'm rationing, cause it's so good I'm gonna miss it when it's gone.

Butter's one of those things I didn't appreciate when I was a kid.

Wonder bread with Parkay? Sweet holy cunt, that was something else.

[Below]:

I was reminded the other day that I didn't have even slightly real Chinese food until I was 15 or 16 and went to Philadelphia. All of the Chinese places I'd been to -- both of them, I guess -- in NH made their food by beer-battering chicken, shrimp, pork, or beef, and then pouring sauce over it. I thought that was pretty much the sum total of American-restaurant Chinese food other than fried rice and noodles.

(That might only be funny when my Jewish friend says it.)

Tonight:

http://www.idea-inc.com/~bill/pizza.jpg

Peel apart some fresh mozzarella, and let it sit on paper towels to dry it out. Fresh mozzarella on pizza = soggy pizza. It's like dousing the thing in milk.

Make pizza crust, with added parmesan, herbs, and crushed red peppers. After it's risen for several hours, punch it down, divide as necessary, and press it into a non-stick, oven safe pan -- drizzle a little olive oil into the pan first, even though it's nonstick.

Let the dough rest in the pan for 15 minutes or so.

Spread pizza sauce over the crust, sprinkle with dry mozzarella (or mix; asiago, parmesan, and mozzarella in my case), cover with slices of prosciutto, cover again with slices of pepperoni, and finally top with the fresh mozzarella.

Bake at about 425 for about 15-20 minutes, until fresh mozzarella is golden and pepperoni has at least started to crisp.

Monkey.

1 bottle of mezcal, not completely full. Maybe 2/3 full.

1 cup sugar.

Many sliced limes and/or lemons and/or limequats (I'm sure kumquats would work fine; I bought limequats, ate some, and then went, "hm, now what?").

Pour sugar into mezcal. Add enough of the sliced citrus to fill the rest of the bottle. Let sit for a few months.

Easter is going to be turkey with rabbit stuffing; chicken would be more Easter-y than turkey, but turkey I want; it isn't stuffed like a turducken with like a whole damn boneless rabbit shoved in the turkey or vice versa, just shredded rabbit in the bread stuffing (the way rabbit is used in the jambalaya at Coop's back home, which is what made me think of it).

lauren my friend brought back this crazy salt licorice booze (vodka i think) from finland last year! it was insane! also he brought back TAR-flavoured vodka!!

Tar-flavored vodka startles even me. Tar like ... tar? Tar like cigarettes? Tar like "it's been compressed in unix"?

ps i love chartreuse

ROAD TAR vodka is weird! I'd try it -- I tried turkey soda -- but still, Jesus.

I'm not a big fan of licorice liquor (that took a lot of tries to type); absinthe was a struggle to get through, and then had no real effect.

But now I've gotten that urge to make rabbit in my head, and naturally, what do I discover? That I've moved to a place where rabbit is worth its damn weight in gold. $20 I paid for rabbit yesterday! $6.99 a pound! That's on the bone, mind you, not like boneless rabbit medallions or some damn thing. By way of comparison -- since I know slutsky the Canadian reads this thread -- that's twice the per-pound price of duck or goose, only slightly less expensive than boneless cuts of ostrich, comparable to a good cut of steak (I like strip and rib-eye, but that's neither here nor there). And there's a lot of bone there! In Louisiana, rabbit was only a little more expensive than chicken. Maybe $2 a pound, $3 if you're at a crappy grocery.

Sigh.

Once I decide to do something like this, I pretty much do it, and I'm not actually using all the rabbit for the Easter turkey: today I'll have a bbq rabbit sandwich, but boy it's going to be an expensive sandwich.

The turkey, for its part, is currently brining with blood oranges and Mexican oregano, because I thought maybe this would be an interesting way to take advantage of blood oranges being at the end of their season -- still being sold, but not really worthwhile anymore.

But yeah, it's not something I'd make often, which is probably good given the price.

Hm, maybe I'll just have the rabbit kidneys by themselves or in dirty rice.

(Or make kidney liquor.)

I just bought Transylvanian buffalo cheese for a friend's birthday. I am envious.

Upside-Down Key Lime Pie

This is one of those fairly simple dishes that benefits from the combination of ingredients -- complementary without being trite. The papaya and honey get their sweet on, the bacon and soy sauce get their smokiness on, and both pairs work great with duck.

2 servings of duck, for instance 2 leg quarters on the bone, or one breast. Cut into several pieces, leaving on the bone (unless you're using a boneless breast, which should be fine). I cut duck quarters into four pieces each: this isn't strictly necessary if you don't have a cleaver.

2-3 slices of thick-cut smoked bacon. I have a small slab of smoked Hungarian bacon, I've been using that.

1 cup of fresh papaya, coarsely chopped.

1/4 sweet onion, sliced.

1 serrano chile, sliced thinly. Depending on your chile, this makes for a dish I'd call a 5 on the 1-10 scale -- too spicy for people who don't like spicy food, and near the top end for people who like it "spicy, but not too spicy."

1-2 tbsp honey. I didn't measure, but that sounds right.

An equal amount of soy sauce.

Precook the duck your favorite way, for getting the fat out: I like to steam it for 30 minutes or so (it's very forgiving if you want to steam it longer than that), after having pricked or sliced the skin, salted it, and let it sit for an hour to leech some of the fat to the surface. When I make duck, I usually know ahead of time I'm going to do so -- so this is a method that takes time, but very little effort.

Preheat the oven to 425, and put the duck in for 5 minutes when the oven is good and hot -- use a nonstick oven-safe pan if possible. After 5 minutes, add the bacon. After another 5 minutes, add the papaya, onion, and serrano, and cook for 7 minutes.

The duck and bacon should be crispy now, and the vegetables cooked but not thoroughly so. Put the pan on the stove at a medium heat, turn off the oven, and add the honey and soy sauce. Cook, stirring constantly, until the sauce has reduced enough that it sticks to everything and leaves very little in the pan (this won't take long, especially if the pan is still hot from the oven).

I'm pretty sure this steaming-roasting-stove combo is the way they make duck at my favorite place to eat duck other than my own kitchen, a Thai place in Cincinnati. The texture comes out exactly the same way, and it holds the sauce similarly.

It's nutty and has a texture (eg not like glue like Quaker Oats) and is heavenly with brown sugar. This is a food I would normally not even consider a food outside of baking uses, but dammit the steel-cut oats are GOOD! Seek them!

Havne't made the potted shrimp yet, cause I had a lot of fresh chicken and ground beef I'd just bought, but it's in my mental hopper.

(I just realized that's the exception to what I was saying about tequila elsethread, in terms of liking it with citrus if it isn't straight: spice and/or chocolate is also great. Christmas Eve, I went through a bar of very dark chocolate by dipping it, square by square, into a shot glass of tequila and thence into a mix of kosher salt and ground Red Amazon chile.)

The spiced hot chocolate sounds good too, but hot chocolate + cheese (like fried mozzarella, or just plain cheese?) demands I try it.

slutsky, you live in the wilds of Canada, do they have hickory and other non-maple sap syrups up there? (I know you can get birch syrup in Alaska, which fascinates me; imagine birch flavored ice cream, or birch frosting on spice cake, or a birch-based barbecue sauce, breaking the mesquite/hickory hegemony!)

this has been the cabane à sucre season, and lots of people i know have gone out to these cabins in the woods where they eat an incredible amount of lard drizzled with maple syrup, then gone out into the snow and drizzled the syrup onto the snow and eaten said snow. after all the eating and the boozing i imagine they either barf or fight, or make love. or all three, of course.

I used to chew spruce sap when I was a kid, from the blue spruce trees on our property -- and I tried to get my parents to make spruce syrup, since we made maple syrup, but alas, no luck.

http://www.sybertooth.com/camp/camp2.jpg

kama : "dish prepared from a mixture of rye-, oat-, barley and peasemeal by mixing it with clabbered milk"
- it sayeth in Paul F. Saagpakk's Estonian-English Dictionary, 1992

http://www.greatbritishkitchen.co.uk/images/staffordshireoatcakes.gif

These are oatcakes....

http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/usrecipes/oatcakes/images/oatcakes-400.jpg

Oh yeah and Tep, Fry's Orange Creme is luverly but Five Centres was the best, they don't make them anymore ;0(

So -- I was looking for champagne-filled chocolates, and found them, but check it out -- scroll down to "chocolate capri log," semi-sweet chocolate goat cheese!

That's the only problem with Jungle Jim's: they have so much stuff that it's easy to overlook things, particularly since some sections are categorized horizontally (i.e. according to context/culture/cuisine) instead of vertically (according to content): I'm grateful for the vertically-categorized produce section, so I don't have to hop back and forth between Thailand, Cuba, and Texas, just to put a side dish together. The rice is all in one place, too; but other than that, since I like to play both in and out of tradition, I have to force everyone to go up and down each aisle with me -- as much as I'm not crazy about French food in general, that's where I'll find the Nicoise olives, and the four spice blend, if I didn't have it already.

See, if offline stores were like the internet, you could just elect to recategorize the way you browse: it would be interesting to grocery-shop alphabetically or in ascending order of price or sell-by date.

And yeah, I'm the kind of person who will be frustrated with myself a couple months from now if I end up forgetting to buy pork belly or frog legs, because I'll think of some recipe involving them. (Frog legs, I'm convinced, would make excellent barbecue, along the lines of pulled pork.)

It's also interesting, though, to look at my list and realize the things I want to be absolutely sure to get, in light of the uncertainty of a return trip: honey mints, Orangina Rouge, the aforementioned frog & pig, mostarda, blood sausage, and that hot-smoked Hungarian bacon that was one of the best and most interesting foods I've ever had; and the way that my anticipation of which fresh, perishable ingredients I'll return with will dictate my cooking for next week: I'll have to make more sausage-potato soup since I want to get sorrel; and if I bring back as much citrus as I have in the past, that'll mean puerco asado; and I'm tempted, now that it's more seasonal and my New Orleans hormones are itching for it, to get some good seafood; so there we go, that's most of a week right there, with probably some odd lunch experiments to fill it out.

(Yes, I have a blog for this, I know; but at this point, if you aren't interested in me talking about food, you aren't reading this thread. And it's a good time for last-minute suggestions, since I'm keeping the list next to me today in case I think of anything.)

The seafood has looked nice in the past, I just wasn't confident of the season (I'm still suspicious of seafood out here in landlocked country) or my ability to bring it home. I have a good, sturdy, well-insulated, and enormous cooler now, and it's a good season for seafood. So I'll at least take a look.

The olive oils have always looked nice -- although usually in that aisle I'm distracted by the hugely expensive balsamic vinegars :)

And they have that new wine section now, which should be easier to navigate than the old one. I bought a bottle of sweet Tokaji last time, but haven't tried it yet.

Breadfruit is starchy enough that it should be more travel-friendly than most tropical fruits, I think, but I've never seen it (come to think of it, I don't even remember seeing it dried).

(Oh: speaking of this thread, I've finally had Scotch eggs. They tasted a whole lot like Egg McMuffins, but better.)

(xp)

another book to look out for = Meat by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall - 500 pages of nummy goodness

And I didn't guess the drunkennness, but that's all right :) In the freezer right now is the second batch of butter, mixed in with sugar, lime juice, heavy cream, and just a little fleur de sel. I have no idea if this'll be any good or not; right now it tastes a little like key lime pie, of course, but every couple bites you get a flake of salt, like with a margarita.

Smoked paprika + mustard + molasses (or any other sweetener, I'd reckon) is one of those easily sauces for ribs and whatnot, too.

The woman at the Spanish Table who handled my order -- I was getting blood sausage too, and there was this whole shipping thing to wrangle -- told me her husband uses it as incense, of all things. The sweet, I'd assume, not the hot.

it will get posted though, probably on pumpkin as soon as I sign up for an account that gives me picturehosting

(Oh, and it's really good in caramels, but I don't know why.)

Most other differences are imaginary and invisible to taste tests.

A good analogy for fleur de sel might be to balsamic vinegar: it has interesting characteristics of its own, but would be wasted if used as a replacement for ordinary vinegar, and is nearly always best when used sparingly and after cooking.

(The supermarket balsamic which has taken over the restaurants doesn't have a fleur de sel equivalent, granted.)

Dinner's my coq au vin (I think it was in last year's cookbook; baked instead of stewed, crispy instead of wet), and later this week I'm going to try to combine New Orleans barbecue shrimp (which isn't barbecued; it's shrimp with butter, Tabasco, and Worcestershire) with shrimp toast. It's a fucking around kind of week.

This thread is like my ILE blog, and/or a message in a bottle where I can talk to slutsky. So, highlights (for children):

1: I AM GOING TO JUNGLE JIM'S THIS WEEKEND! Despite Cincinnati-area flooding. Friends are bringing me odd snacks and Walker's crisps from China, so I can skip the snacky stuff at JJ and focus on other exotica. I'm out of ghee, want to examine the anchovies, and will definitely get marmite (or is marmite capitalized?) and unfiltered sake.

2: I was a little bit kicked out of graduate school, so grocery shopping in another city will be a good distraction.

3: And then I'm going to New Orleans! Pistolettes! Crab! Jambalaya at Coop's!

By the way, re: smoked paprika above, it's very good on homemade French fries (especially with a little grated-on-a-cheese-grater unsweetened chocolate, an ingredient I am playing with lately and like with anything salty).

what's up with number 2.? what happened? how are you doing?

I was going to ask the same thing!

At the moment, I can make enough money writing to balance out, as long as I defer my student loans. It's not a big deal, just kind of a mild surprise (I have been at least a part-time student for most of the last eleven and a half years, my OED.com withdrawal will hit in about two weeks).

The Rally's that had been next to the Krispy Kreme which hosted the Krispyburger invention -- the Rally's that thus inspired it all, although the McGriddle deserves some credit -- is no longer there. It is the end of an era.

An expanded olive bar (although I'm lazy about olives and only buy pitted ones usually, which keeps my choices pretty limited);

An expanded Hispanic foods section;

German cheeses I totally missed last time because of the size of the cheese area;

A tour of the fish tanks where they farm their own fish (not for all the fish they carry, of course, but stuff like tilapia and other rabbits of the sea);

A LIQUOR STORE.

The monorail is still under construction.

xp you can get reeds ginger ice cream at trader joe's in Indianapolis you know.

We just went to Trader Joe's in Indy the other day! I got blood oranges and prosecco and made a lot of mimosas. And those Italian chocolate bars with the amaretti cookies crushed up in them.

Oh, on the Strange/Interesting Food tip, too, folks: Coke is testing a coffee-flavored Coke called Blak (I don't have the link handy) and is going to roll out Lime Coke sometime this year.

I am so lame.

My Pepsi Blue has all gone flat, so I'm going to reduce it down into a syrup and recombine it with club soda.

If I ran the circus:

* More Dr Pepper competitors: bring back 7-Up Gold and Dr Slice, and have Pepsi FINALLY come out with a Dr Pepper type soda.

* Sour patch kids enters the soda arena. Too long we have neglected tartness in our fizzy beverages.

* Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr do surreal ad campaign -- using re-edited outtakes from their scenes together in The Singing Detective -- for the next big chocolate bar craze, AERO AMERICA

* Malted sodas.

* Home-use soda fountains designed around the coffee maker price point, with name brand syrups (regional/niche sodas could go "national" much more easily if they only had to ship the syrup, hello Cheerwine, Green River, and Vernors) AND "fountain only" exclusives as a sneaky way for Coke/Pepsi/etc to test-market new flavors. Package the syrup in both reclosable packages and single-batch (1 liter of finished product) packages, keep the basic fountain to a single spout; introduce dual and triple spout models at higher prices. A $70 soda fountain isn't going to catch on except as an upgrade from a $25 one.

A vote for Tep is a vote for me.

There's no diet Holiday Spice, unfortunately -- Holiday Spice is officially cancelled, since Pepsi is now doing seasonal sodas (which means its replacement is either out and I don't know about it, or about to come out; hmm, quarterly sodas, what comes before summer, maybe it's ST PATRICKS DAY SHILLELAGH PEPSI), but they didn't have a diet one to begin with. That's the problem with the soda flavor craze, hardly any of them get diet versions -- Cherry Vanilla Dr Pepper is the only one in years to include its diet variant at launch.

xpost -- the thing with Diet Coke is that it's not really a diet version of Coca-Cola so much as it's the diet cola made by the Coca-Cola Company, if you see what I mean. Whereas Diet Pepsi is intended to be a more direct analogue to Pepsi. Coca-Cola has cinnamon and cloves both, yeah, and more orange than Pepsi does (almost every cola contains some amount of orange, it's part of what makes up what we think of as "cola flavor"; and it's one reason why so many well-meaning "as few ingredients as possible" gourmet colas don't taste recognizably like cola) -- and I think those are all things either missing in Diet Coke or used in much smaller amounts. The spiciness and tartness are both missing.

I have decided to issue myself a scallop crudo challenge, i.e. while I'm shopping at Jungle Jim's I'm going to put aside a couple ingredients I can use to make scallop crudo (Yet Another Term for raw fish) in the car as soon as we leave. I spent like half an hour this morning trying to find an eyeglass case one of my paring knives would fit into, which is when it struck me: why do I have more than one paring knife, and why on earth do I have so many eyeglass cases?

(I'm resisting the urge to find out which if any of those are in the D.C. area because I don't want to jinx that. But I have to assume Congressmen love organic produce as much as the rest of us.)

xpost -- yep, the Castleton one is the one we went to. And oh man! Money is potentially tight this semester because of the whole firing thing, but I will have to plan a Lafayette trip. Crazy Chef Tony must be experienced again!

What we don't have is affordable housing, but that is another thread. . .

And maaaan, Whole Foods. We both miss their store-brand soda and bakery above all else.

There's affordable housing, Quince--you've just got to drive in from Baltimore every day....

End rant. I console myself with great food! The chinese restaurants in the Rockville area are killer and there are many strange and hard-to-find foods to be had.

The one that delivers uses cheap pickled jalapenos (the kind that taste more like pickles than jalapenos) for all its spicy dishes, instead of dried chiles ... which is really weird in most cases.

bill cosby gets his cheeseburgers with peanut butter and mayonnaise in 'mother, jugs, and speed.' the memory has always stuck with me.

I'm talking myself into buying cheese now.

Cheddar with Whisky! Well, I'll have to try that. I think I saw it, actually -- maybe not Arran, I don't know.

I don't know if what I had a few weeks ago was Arran, all I know is that it was a certain kind of very expensive ($20/lb) cheddar, and the judges at the scotch tasting they had deemed it to be the best. It was probably the most perfectly matched flavors I've ever experienced.

I'm gonna miss the OED, though, seriously. I'm just glad I had started using Wikipedia as my non-specialist reference, so that the OED's all I miss. (Scratch that -- the OED and online full-text journal access.)

Harvey Keitel! Geez. Now he has to have a sitcom.

you should try to find screwpine and experiment with fragrant malaysian dishes.

What, they wouldn't do this for single people?

Screwpine -- I just got a bottle of Rooh-something the other day, "summer drink concentrate" that's this bright red syrup flavored with rose and screwpine. It's very good in champagne.

Nice. Do the Teeny thing and just have a priest and his wife do the ceremony and you'll be good to go.

And then I'll make some hot wings or something.

(And I hate ceremonies and formal shit. If I went nuts and bought a gun and shot all my loved ones, I would totally shoot myself while I was at it just to get out of going to the funeral.)

I have sliced pig's stomach roasted with soy sauce, garlic, and ginger.

I have fizzy cola bottles.

Other things --

Tim Tams (iir the name c), Blair's Death Rain potato chips;

much citrus (blood oranges, Meyer lemons, cara cara oranges, honey tangerines, minneolas, ugli/uniq fruit, sour oranges);

some very nice soft cow's milk cheese marinated in sunflower oil;

prosciutto, various salamis, and chorizo;

Rogue Morimoto ale, unfiltered sake, Bonny Doon freisa frizzante, Three Philosophers Belgian ale blended with cherry lambic, Lindemans kriek and cassis lambics, an Islay Scotch;

duck legs and a pork picnic;

black vinegar and coconut vinegar;

mayonnaise flavored snacks;

big sacks of basmati and arborio rices;

Tillamook butter;

opal basil;

culantro (a relative of cilantro, much stronger-flavored, used in Trinidadian dishes that are so spicy no other herb would come through);

smoked scallops;

and I'm blanking on what else.

I made adobo like 12 times over the holidays, so I probably won't get to trying this until next month.

I'm thinking, though, I'll have to make some vinegar chicken :) It's the kind of thing where the differences in vinegars really stands out, sometimes even moreso than in a vinaigrette (depending on what else is in the vinaigrette).

Strange or hard to find "food" you should try: Twinkies flavored lip balm. I got this in my x-mas stocking but have been too scared to try it.

Quincie, I'll trade you something for the lip balm if you want, just name it!

* Often just called "local vinegar" in Philippines (which is misleading since the Philippines have so many local varieties of vinegar, but if everyone knows what they mean, I reckon they can call it Alakazam Doodlebug and it'd still work out).

* Penguin/Oxford sez: Toddy, an alcoholic liquor, is made by tapping the tree, which is done by cutting off the tip of a flower stem. The sap released ferments quickly and spontaneously. The resulting toddy can be drunk raw; or distilled to make arak; or used as a source of yeast for bread; or allowed to turn into vinegar.

* It does have a slight aftertaste, although I think that'll come out more when I've made something with it -- the acrid smell is very strong.

* Seems to be used in Indian, Sri Lankan, and Thai cooking as well (so I'd assume also Southeast Asian in general).

I'm going to make a papaya salad with it, I think -- the papayas I have are not really green papayas, but they're not fully ripe, either, so I'll shred those, dress em with coconut vinegar and citrus and some spice...

Like sour milk with surgical spirit in it.

Filipino cooking is one of those things I'm learning in bits and pieces, and I don't have a handle on the big picture yet, other than the "it's one of those 'naturally occurring fusion cuisines,' with elements that would seem forced if a restaurateur had put them together" thing. I haven't found an excellent cookbook -- most of them are either recipe-driven without much discussion, or appropriate for the Time-Life series Tours Of The Exotic Kitchens Of Brown People -- so most of what I know, I get from blogs.

Remove any small bone fragments you create in the process.

Brown chicken, skin-side down, in a non-stick pan; when skin begins to crisp, add some chopped onions to the fat that's cooked out of the chicken, stir until the onions lose their rawness, sprinkle everything with a generous amount of crushed dried chiles (crushed red pepper'll do it, and you can play around with using powders instead, or fresh/pickled chiles, etc), and add enough vinegar to come up maybe halfway on the chicken.

Cook on medium-heat until vinegar is cooked away and chicken is cooked through. Shazam!

It would probably be too expensive to mail them, wouldn't it? I mean, that'd be great, obviously, and if there was anything I could get you, just name it -- but it wouldn't be worth spending like $20 in postage on or anything.

Every time I go to Jungle Jim's, I check out the honey table. Selection doesn't change all that often, and I don't like flavored honeys like blueberry walnut velvet surprise or ramsbladder cup or whatever, but man, ever since I discovered Tupelo honey however many years ago, I've been a nut for really good, pure honey.

For a while -- well, still, since I have two jars of it in the kitchen -- I was hooked on Greek forest honeys, which is sort of the "wild yeast bread" of honey. The bees aren't kept in a clover field or whatever, they're eating the nectar produced by other insects who don't need flowers to chow down -- you can taste the difference much more than you'd imagine, if all you've had is clover/wildflower/meadow honey.

This time, I got this, a New Zealand variety of forest honey -- beech trees instead of evergreens -- and man oh fuck, it's the best honey I've had, to an extent that that phrase means more than it would have three or four years ago.

Sheep's Milk Cheese Ice Cream.

Dude, it has three different dairy products listed in the title, math says it is good.

Ferran Adria makes a parmesan ice cream sandwich with parmesan ice cream pressed between parmesan crisps (grate parmesan onto a baking sheet, cook until golden, let cool). I started thinking about it -- mascarpone in tiramisu, cream cheese in cheesecake, Creole cream cheese ice cream, frozen yogurt (cultured dairy, just like cheese) -- and said, hey, fuck it.

I don't know if this is the best or easiest or most sensible way to make this, but it's the way I made it.

First make a cheese syrup (!):

Heat some heavy cream in a pan -- 3 or 4 tablespoons depending on how much ice cream you're making. Add an equal amount of sugar, and grate an equal amount of firm sheep's milk cheese into it -- Pecorino, anything with roughly the texture of parmesan.

Heat until cheese is melted and sugar is dissolved.

Taste it. If you hate it, don't bother going further.

Let cool.

With an immersion blender or whatever you've got that can do the work, whip another cup of cold heavy cream in a cold metal bowl until stiff. Whip the cheese syrup into it, and a small egg yolk (I had quail eggs, I used a quail egg). Cover and freeze.

xpost; sheep's milk cheese is sort of halfway between goat cheese (which I don't usually like) and regular cow's milk cheese. It has a distinctive taste that's kind of tangy compared to cow's milk, but not nearly as much as goat cheese -- tends to be nutty, the way good parmesan is.

(This is what jess was referring to, it seems.)

(btw, Tep, I made your 'tangy citrus pickles' from yr 2004 cookbook last night--let 'em sit overnight--they were fantastic in the makeshift shawarma (roast chicken, marinated in lemon, garlic, coriander, chopped and stuffed in pitas with arugala, tabbouleh, garlic sauce, chili sauce, and yr picklesmmmmmm) we had tonight!

I was going to make them for a cuban sandwich, as you suggest, but the store was out of pork loin, so chicken it became.)

Maple syrup aged in bourbon barrels. So good.